I have just spent five days in Panama City, my first ever visit there. Now, most people who put the metropolis (is it a metropolis?) on their bucket list do so because of that canal thingy. The canal was never on my list. Come to think of it, I don’t know that I really have a list – it’s more of a vague cloud of random thoughts of things to do in this lifetime.

I did go see the thing, or at least the Miraflores Visitor Center, which fronts one of the original locks. There are three more, modern ones, where most of the ship traffic apparently passes. I was informed on arrival that “the morning boat just finished going through about half an hour ago, and the afternoon boat will be here in five hours, so make yourself comfortable. No, I don’t think I will. I’m not going to sit on a drizzly day, or even a sunny day, and wait five hours for a ship to pass the locks. I’ve done that (with less wait time) on the Erie Canal, and even ridden a boat through it.

I did a half day tour out to the Gamboa Nature Preserve area. I got to feed some monkeys. It’s a bit touristy, but fun. And I hit a bunch of museums – the Panama Canal Museum, the Panama City History Museum, the Mola Museum (a particular form of artwork from one of primary original populations in the area, the Guna), the Biomuseum, and, of course, in Latin American, one must visit and take the obligatory photo in more than one Catholic church – like the National Cathedral, and St. Joseph’s Basilica, for example. The first was the most fascinating, but all were really interesting. On to my reason for being there – checking out the local food scene.

Yesterday I posted a detailed review of the four restaurants that were top of my list to check out – the four that made it onto last year’s Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list. It’s my first paid post over on Substack – a toe in the water for maybe a bit of reimbursement for the nearly twenty years I’ve been writing these posts. Sign up, support the cause! I do actually have some paid subscribers, both on an annual and monthly basis, and thank you to them! Or, there’s a little donate button on the front page of this blog for just like, one time “thanks for doing this” folk. As such, I’m only going to put a cursory review of those four spots here, along with the other places I dined. If you want more detail….

Intimo, Calle 72 Este, is in the San Francisco section of the city came in at #86 on the list. The place feels a bit like a neighborhood dive bar, but with a great wine list, including some interesting and unusual stuff by the glass. The food, for me, with only two plates sampled, wasn’t much of a wow. I liked the flavors of both the clams in roasted corn and ginger brown butter, and the focaccia it was served with was great, but they, and the salt baked prawns that I tried after, were overcooked and rubbery, and the latter hadn’t been cleaned properly.

Fonda Lo Que Hay, at #51, in the Edificio Colegio on Calle Obaldía in the Casco Histórico, is a bit touristy, and I knew that going in. At the same time, it’s fun, lively, and serves pretty damned good food. Here, the clams, in a garlic, smoked paprika, chili crunch, and cashew medley, were not just cooked right, but addictively delicious. Followed by a fascinating take on penne cacio e pepe that added in smoked veal tongue, fried bananas, and crispy wonton noodles that was good, though needed far more pepper to be a real cacio e pepe (swiftly provided by my waiter and the kitchen).

Cantina del Tigre, Calle 68 Este (“at the end, in front of the black house”), back in the San Francisco neighborhood came in at #26. Here, in a jungle themed, casual, almost cafeteria style seating bar, they’re serving up some really creative and interesting food. An amberjack tartare was delicious, as was the bar snack of crispy fried prawn heads in “fish dip”, almost like a great whitefish salad at your favorite bagel spot. But the star was the rice based tamál topped with papaya, papaya seeds, and coconut, smoky in it’s roasted rather than steamed husks.

Maito, Calle 50 in the ritzier far northeast Coco del Mar section of the city, came in at #6 for all of Latin America, a high standing indeed. A sampling of four appetizers was marred a bit by being rushed out from the kitchen because they had a tour bus filled with something like 40 people who arrived at the same time I did, and they made a logistical decision that was off-putting for those of us at smaller tables. Still, the food was fantastic – here, I also tried an amberjack tartare, excellent; a tomato salad with a spicy (harissa?) smoked melon emulsion; shrimp wontons were a little on the bland side; and the star of the eve, these sugarcane and chili slow smoked short-ribs that I would happily eat any day of any week.

On to the rest of the food!

Concolón Panamanian Street Food, C. San Lucas, in the center of town – actually just a few block walk from my hotel (the El Panamá, the first hotel ever opened in the country, and still operating, and really nice, and half the price of hotels in the surrounding area). Casual neighborhood spot serving up local dishes, and, of course, specializing in the concolón, the crispy rice left at the bottom of the pot – more often than not, intentionally.

My waitress assured me that ordering the “couple of bites” patacones filled with ropa vieja, slow braised beef, would not at all impact my ability to eat the main course. You can’t really tell from this photo, but those things are both full sandwich size. I would have barely been able to finish both of them without feeling stuffed. I ate one. It was quite possibly the best ropa vieja I’ve had, anywhere.

Since I had already ordered the patacones with beef, I went with the crispy lechón, suckling pig, for my concolón. Not mentioned were a) that in addition to the pork (yummy!) and the half bowl sized concolón itself, there would also be a mound of rice, and a lake of red beans – the whole thing, to my mind, enough for two to share. I don’t think I quite ate half of this plate, but every bite was worth it. My waitress seemed surprised, offering that eating those two plates of food seemed like a normal sized lunch to her.

Aria, Calle Juan Ramón Poll C, in the Obarrio section of the city. It’s, I was informed by my Uber driver, the Jewish section of the city. Until I was planning this trip, I had no idea that Panama City as a large Jewish population – roughly 25,000, of whom something like 21,000 are Orthodox. That has, naturally, led to there apparently being a couple of dozen or more kosher restaurants in the city, the biggest concentration of them in this area. Aria is touted as one of the better ones, focused on Japanese influenced local cuisine, and sushi.

Every sushi bar out there these days offers edamame or shishito peppers to nibble on while you await your fish. But how many offer crispy okra? Aria does, and it’s really good.

I went with their four pairs of “special nigiri”, salmon and tuna prepared two different ways each. Good, but nothing to write home about, even if I just did. A little pricey, with the okra running $12 and the nigiri running $11/pair.

A visit to the Mercado de Mariscos, Ciclovía Cinta Costera, just outside the historic center of the city, Casco Histórico, and right next to Chinatown. I was really hoping for some offbeat fish or shellfish that perhaps I hadn’t seen before, but everything was pretty ordinary, albeit plentiful and fresh. I wandered a bit, fended off vendors, who were quite relentless in trying to get me to buy stuff – one even telling me that he was quite sure that I could buy his wares, and go upstairs, and somewhere up there was someone who would cook the fish for me.

The market is surrounded on… two and half sides… by about four dozen food stands, serving up primarily ceviches and fried dishes, but individual places have specialty dishes too. At the same time, one hawker let me know that “everyone here serves the exact same menu items, some of us just serve one or another dish that’s better than at other places”.

What I really wanted to try was a lobster ceviche, but no one was serving one (several places had it on their menu), only lobster cocktails – basically a mayo based lobster salad. I tried one, it was fine, nothing special, and definitely need the addition of the asked for and received hot sauce on the side. Apparently market custom, every ceviche and cocktail that I saw was served with a packet of what are basically saltines. some people were using them to scoop, some were crumbling them up into their dishes, most seemed to be ignoring them, as did I.

And, two ceviches, side by side on the same plate – one a corvina (drum, or croaker, which seems to be the main fish used for ceviches here) one, the other a mixed shrimp and octopus one. Bizarrely, to me, no one was offering a mixed fish and shellfish ceviche. I was informed that “it’s just not done”. And the two women I got this plate from seemed quite put out that I wanted both, in the same meal. These, too, needed hot sauce, as Panamanians don’t make their dishes with chilies in them, it’s always, apparently, on the side, to be added to personal tastes. And, to my tastes, both the fish and shellfish had spent too much time bathing in their respective leches, to the point where they were getting mealy.

La Tapa de Coco, Calle 68 Este is a newly opened lunchroom sort of spot from a gregarious chef who started off serving Afro-Panamanian street food, I believe from a food truck or stand. He came out to say hello after I let them know we had a mutual friend who had sent me his way – check out Nicholas Gill’s New Worlder, particularly for gastronomic travels in Central America and northern South America.

Really tasty salt cod fritters. The three sauces they’re served with are a tartar sauce (very herby, very good), ketchup (okay), and “hottie berry”, a blend of blackberry and habanero chili, which was good, and created specifically for these fritters, but for me, the habanero was too muted. Not like I left even a crumb. The local drink, a saril, is a hibiscus and ginger tea that I will be making on hot summer days at home.

Fitting in with the add your own spice ethos, the jerk chicken has no heat, though two “afro-hot sauces” were served on the side on request. Instead, it’s really good sweet barbecue chicken with dirty rice, a piece of a banana, and a salad. Good eating, highly improved by generously dabbed hot sauce.

And, one more fine dining spot, that didn’t make it on the “List”, highly recommended by a friend and colleague in the wine biz, Tomillo, Calle 71, once again in the ritzy San Francisco area. Very chic. For some reason I was the sole occupant of the over-air-conditioned dining room, everyone else (and there were a lot of everyone elses) was seated out on the terrace, but apparently I didn’t rate for that. It was a little odd, as was service the entire evening.

The house specialty is a whole lobster tail in an “aji amarillo” sauce. It hadn’t occurred to me that in a spice-averse culture, that they weren’t talking about yellow chilies, but about yellow bell peppers. Still, good flavors, though the lobster was definitely overcooked. I think this might be my biggest negative about the seafood in Panama City, at least from the eight places I tried, is that shellfish seems to be almost universally overcooked and a bit rubbery. The only exception I can think of were the clams at Fonda Lo Que Hay.

And, my sole dessert of the week, as it sounded interesting… the description was “Chocolate covered. Lemon cream, mango and beetroot jelly, biscuit ash.” The kind of “chefy” thing that occasinoally leads me try a dessert. This was not what I expected, a bell jar filled with smoke, and a ramekin of green powder.

The bell jar lifted away, there was what appeared to be a blackened piece of wood, accompanied by a small, quite pretty mallet, which I had to use to break open said log. The chocolate layer was very thick, and took quite a few whacks. Inside, the lemon cream, but no mango and beetroot jelly, instead some bits of candied pineapple (waiter’s response… “what’s the difference?”), and the green powder was, I guess, the “biscuit ash”, though it wasn’t an ash, I don’t know what it was, and he couldn’t explain it. It was green powder that added a vaguely smoky hint to the dish. I just sort of nibbled at the whole thing, a bit disappointed in the whole meal, sorry to say.

If I had to pick my “don’t miss” places, from this limited sampling of eight spots, it’d be Concolón Panamanian Street Food on the cheap and cheerful end, and Cantina del Tigre on the more expensive, yet still casual end. I suppose if I had to pick a place both expensive and chic, it would be Maito.

And with that, I’m on to New York City for visits with friends, some eating out, of course, and then on again to another stop, soon to be revealed. You can follow my NYC eats on my Instagram, and I’ll also end up doing a summary post, probably much like this one.