El Plato Típico: Casado

Casados, are the names for the typical plates of Costa Rican cuisine. What is a casado exactly, well it's a plate of food consisting of rice, beans, salad, tortillas, fried bananas, some type of meat and a natural fruit drink. They are found in almost every restaurant in Costa Rica and are fairly cheap. I've paid as little as $3.00 and as high as $6.00 for a casado.

In Spanish, casado means "married." I thought it was a little weird when I first arrived in Costa Rica that casado was always written on menus. After a little research I've found two possibilities of why a casado is called a casado. One being that the plate of food has a marriage or togetherness of all the flavors. The other reason I found was that these plates were served in restaurants, and customers would say they wanted to be treated as casado or married, meaning that married men ate this type dish when at home. I'm going with the first reason, it seems more reasonable.

For the meats typically you can choose from fish, beef, chicken or seafood (depending where you are in Costa Rica). I normally go with the fish, because the beef here is much different than what I'm used to in the U, and I like to take advantage of paying $4.00 on average for a fish fillet.

The natural fruit juice is my favorite part of the casado. There are so many different types of fruit available in Costa Rica, it's unreal. The typical varieties that a person is able to choose from is, pineapple/piña, blackberry/mora, cas, watermelon/sandía, papaya and iced tea/te frio. Cas, pineapple and blackberry (mora in Spanish) are my favorites. I explained what cas was in one of my earlier blog posts.

Despite the blandness of the casado dish, I do like it for the most part because you get so much food, able to have some variety and choosing and it's really cheap.


¡Pura Vida!