PanamaPassage

Panama Passage guide

Food and Drink in Panama

Panamanian food centers on a common set of ingredients (maize, rice, wheat flour, plantains, yuca, beef, chicken, pork, and seafood) and on Panama-style seafood, with ceviche prepared from corvina and tilapia and arroz con camarones y coco as a classic Panamanian dish.

What You Need to Know First

The common ingredients of Panamanian cooking are maize, rice, wheat flour, plantains, yuca (cassava), beef, chicken, pork, and seafood, the same staples that anchor the everyday kitchen across the country’s provinces and comarcas.[1] Seafood is a defining element of the cuisine: Panama-style ceviche uses corvina (sea bass) and tilapia in lemon juice with chopped onion, celery, cilantro, assorted peppers, and sea salt, and arroz con camarones y coco (rice with shrimp and coconut) is a classic Panamanian dish.[1][2] Both are sold from the Mercado de Mariscos on the Avenida Balboa in Panama City and from coast-side restaurants in the Pacific Riviera.

The Staples

Sancocho (a chicken or sometimes fish soup thickened with yuca, ñame, plantain, and culantro, served with rice on the side) is the most common Sunday lunch across Panama.[1] Arroz con pollo (rice with chicken) and arroz con guandú y coco (rice with pigeon peas and coconut), the latter especially popular on the Caribbean coast during end-of-year holidays, round out the everyday table.[1] Hojaldres, a fried-dough bread served for breakfast with cheese, meat, or honey, are a classic Panamanian morning staple.[1] Carimañolas are yuca-cassava fritters stuffed with beef, eaten as a snack or appetizer.[1]

Regional Variation

The Azuero Peninsula (Los Santos and Herrera provinces, with the southern tip of Veraguas) is the cattle-ranching heartland and runs drier than the rest of the country; its cuisine leans heavily on corn-based dishes and beef.[1] The Caribbean coast (Colón and Bocas del Toro provinces) shows a different food chain: Afro-Antillean influence dominates, with arroz con guandú and patí (a meat-filled turnover) the everyday staples, fish abundant, and coconut milk a frequent cooking medium.[1] The highlands, Chiriquí and parts of Veraguas, use fresh cheese (queso blanco), trout from mountain streams, and vegetables from the Boquete and Cerro Punta farms.[1]

Holiday and Carnival Food

Panamanian Christmas dinner typically includes chicken tamales, arroz con pollo, puerco asado (roast pork), pernil, pavo (turkey), and relleno (stuffing), often accompanied by ron ponche (a Panamanian eggnog) and fruitcake.[1] Carnival food in Las Tablas and Penonomé, the two big Carnival capitals, is street-led: carimañolas, empanadas, ceviche sold from carts, and raspados (shaved ice with flavored syrups).[1]

Drinks

Seco Herrerano, an aguardiente produced in Pesé, Herrera Province, by Varela Hermanos,[5] is the country’s signature sugarcane spirit. The brand’s history dates to 1908.[4] The craft-beer scene includes Casa Bruja, La Rana Dorada, and Cervecería Clandestina, several of which source organic cacao from Bocas del Toro.[3] Non-alcoholic staples include saril, a Christmas-season drink made from sorrel sepals with ginger, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, water, and a splash of rum, and chicha and chicheme, corn-based drinks that are essential to festivals and to La Chorrera’s identity.[1]

Arroz con Guandú: Rice with Pigeon Peas and Coconut

Arroz con guandú is the Panamanian take on rice cooked with pigeon peas (most often as arroz con guandú y coco, with coconut milk), and it is a dish of the Caribbean coast and the Christmas table rather than an everyday national staple. Its roots are Afro-Antillean: the recipe came into Panama with Jamaican migrants who arrived from the 1840s into the 1940s to work the banana plantations, the railway, and the canal.

Beer in Panama: Balboa, Atlas, and the Craft Scene

Panama's beer market is dominated by two mass-market brands, Atlas and Balboa, both produced by Cervecería Nacional, with Cristal and Soberana filling out the mainstream and a small but real craft scene (Casa Bruja, Cervecería Clandestina) concentrated in Panama City. Beer sits alongside rum and Seco Herrerano as one of the three pillars of the country's drinking.

Breakfast in Panama: Traditional Morning Foods

The traditional Panamanian breakfast is a morning meal of fried and corn-based foods, namely hojaldras (the fried bread), carimañolas (the cassava fritters), tortilla de maíz viejo (the old-corn tortilla), and eggs, accompanied by the coffee that is the country's signature hot drink. The morning table draws on Spanish-colonial, Afro-Caribbean, and indigenous threads, and it varies by region more than the lunch or dinner tables do.

Carimañolas: Cassava Meat Pies

A carimañola is a fried turnover built on cassava dough rather than wheat flour, a tube of pressed, boiled yuca stuffed with ground beef, shredded chicken, or cheese and deep-fried until crisp. It is a dish of Panama's Caribbean coast, shared with the Colombian Caribbean across the border, and its cassava dough reaches back to the indigenous cassava-processing tradition that turns a poisonous root into an edible staple.

Casco Viejo Restaurants: Panama City's Historic Dining District

Casco Viejo, the historic core of Panama City inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997, is Panama's densest dining neighborhood. The four blocks of restored colonial architecture from Plaza Catedral down to the Cinta Costera hold roughly 60 restaurants across Panamanian, Latin-American, Mediterranean, Japanese, and contemporary-fusion categories. Most sit on four streets: Avenida Central, Calle 8, Avenida Perú, and the Plaza Catedral perimeter.

Ceviche in Panama: Corvina, Coconut Milk, and Regional Styles

Panama's ceviche is an acid-cured fish or seafood dish that two local choices make unmistakably Panamanian: firm-fleshed white *corvina* (or tilapia inland) as the base fish, and *ají chombo* (a *Capsicum chinense* chili in the 150,000-350,000 SHU range, introduced by Caribbean traders) as the heat. This page walks the corvina-plus-lemon-plus-ají-chombo recipe skeleton, where to eat it (the Mercado de Mariscos on Avenida Balboa and the coastal *fondas*), the mixed-seafood and coconut-milk variants, and how Panamanian ceviche reads against the Peruvian, Mexican, Ecuadorian, and Caribbean traditions it sits beside.

Chocolate and Cacao in Panama

Cacao is one of Panama's major agricultural products, and the country appears on the global list of cocoa-producing nations. The crop is grown in the Caribbean islands of Bocas del Toro and the highlands of Chiriquí, and it anchors a small but real artisanal-chocolate and craft-food scene, including a crossover into craft beer, where Bocas cacao flavours at least one Panamanian brewery's beer.

Coffee in Panama: Chiriquí Highlands and the Boquete Region

Almost all Panamanian coffee comes from one province, Chiriquí, where three growing areas (Boquete, Volcán/Tierras Altas, and Renacimiento) sit on the slopes of the Volcán Barú and produce the arabica lots behind the country's specialty reputation. This page maps the regions, the arabica varieties (Geisha, Caturra, Catuai, Typica, Bourbon), the washed/natural/honey processing split, the December-to-March harvest calendar, and how to buy and visit, with the record-setting Geisha lots covered on a separate page.

Cooking Classes and Culinary Tours in Panama

Panama's cooking-class and culinary-tour scene is concentrated in Panama City and its Casco Viejo historic district, where booking aggregators list guided Panamanian cooking classes, market-to-kitchen experiences, and cocktail classes. This page covers that scene at the level the sources support (the existence and character of the classes), with an explicit note on what operator-level detail is and is not sourced.

Geisha Coffee: The Variety That Put Panama on the Specialty Map

Geisha (also spelled Gesha) is an Ethiopia-origin arabica variety whose cultivation in Panama, especially Boquete, has produced the most expensive green-coffee lots ever sold at international auction: a 2004 Best of Panama debut at $21/lb, a 2005 lot at $350/lb, then-record after-record lots through 2025, and a flavor profile built around jasmine, bergamot, and tropical fruit.

Holiday Foods: Christmas, Easter, and Special Occasions

The Panamanian holiday table is dominated by Christmas, which is the country's largest food holiday: a spread of chicken tamales, arroz con pollo, roast pork and turkey, fruit and fruitcake, and the ron ponche eggnog that is the season's traditional drink. Around it sit arroz con guandú as the arroz navideño rice, and the Carnival festival tradition anchored on the Azuero Peninsula at Las Tablas.

Indigenous Foods and Traditional Cooking Methods

Panama's indigenous foodways are the deepest layer of the country's food, and they are not a single tradition but three: the Guna of the Caribbean archipelago, whose diet runs on plantains, coconuts, and fish; the Embera of the Darién, whose cooking turns the poisonous cassava root into a storable flatbread; and the Ngäbe-Buglé of the western comarcas, whose subsistence agriculture is supplemented by seasonal mango, nance, and cacao.

Markets, Grocery Stores, and Food Shopping

Food shopping in Panama runs from the Mercado de Mariscos (Panama City's seafood market, where ceviche is sold in cups for about a dollar or two) through the supermarket chains that supply everyday groceries, to the interior-town public markets and the smaller organic and farmers' market layer. This page covers that retail landscape at the level the sources support: the seafood market in detail, the supermarket chains by example, and the broader market tradition.

Panama City Dining Guide

Panama City is the country's dining capital, and its restaurant scene centres on Casco Viejo (the historic district settled in 1673 after the destruction of Panamá Viejo, now a dense cluster of restaurants, boutique hotels, and bars). Around it sit the modern dining neighbourhoods of San Francisco, El Cangrejo, and Costa del Este, and the scene as a whole runs toward fire-driven kitchens, farm-to-table sourcing, and intimate-scale rooms.

Panamanian Cuisine Overview: Influences, Regions, and Daily Dishes

Panamanian food is built on a shared ingredient base (maize, rice, plantains, yuca, beef, chicken, pork, and seafood) that the country's three culinary layers (Indigenous, Spanish/European, and Afro-Antillean) recombine into visibly different plates from one province to the next. This overview frames those three influences, lays out the daily-dish canon (sancocho, arroz con pollo, ceviche, carimañolas, tamales, patacones), and walks the central-province, Caribbean-coast, Chiriquí-highlands, and Panama City regions, then hands off to the per-dish and per-region topic pages for depth.

Patacones: Panama's Twice-Fried Green Plantains

Patacones are twice-fried green-plantain slices (what the same dish is called tostones in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and most of the Caribbean) that in Panama show up at every meal as an everyday side, a *Chorrillo* fried-fish plate, and the typical next-to-the-rice or next-to-the-eggs companion.

Regional Cuisine of Panama: Azuero, Bocas, Chiriquí

Panama does not have one cuisine so much as three regional ones layered over a shared ingredient base. The Azuero Peninsula runs on cattle, dry-arc grain farming, and the festival tradition of Las Tablas; the Caribbean coast (Colón, Bocas del Toro) runs on the Afro-Antillean coconut-and-rice cooking that came in with Jamaican migration; and the Chiriquí highlands run on coffee, dairy, and cool-climate vegetables. The common base (maize, rice, plantain, yuca, beef, chicken, pork, and seafood) runs underneath all three.

Sancocho: Panama's National Chicken and Root-Vegetable Stew

Sancocho is a chicken-and-root-vegetable soup or stew that, in Panama, fills the role held by *bife de chorizo* in Buenos Aires or *phở* in Hanoi: one dish that the rest of the country arranges itself around. The 196flavors encyclopedia names it *el plato nacional de Panamá*; the BBC Travel feature documents it as the defining Sunday-lunch dish; the regional Wikipedia entry treats it as the Panamanian version of a broader Latin American family of soups.

Seafood of Panama: From Ocean to Table

Panama is a two-ocean country, and its seafood table shows it. The signature is ceviche (most often made from corvina and cured in lemon juice with onion, cilantro, and a hit of chombo chili), and around it sits a coastal repertoire of coconut-shrimp rice, fried whole fish, and the hearty seafood soups that run through both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts.

Seco Herrerano: The Sugarcane Spirit from Pesé

Seco Herrerano is Panama's signature clear spirit, a sugarcane aguardiente distilled three times to 35% ABV, produced by Varela Hermanos in the town of Pesé, in Herrera Province, since 1908. It is widely treated as the country's national spirit, though that designation is a matter of common usage rather than a documented formal decree, and it is drunk straight, mixed with milk (seco con leche), or in the Chichita Panamá cocktail.

Street Food in Panama: What to Eat and Where

Street food in Panama is, in the words of a Panamanian food blog, "more than just a quick meal — it's a blend of the cultures that make Panamá unique." It runs from the ceviche sold in cups at Panama City's Mercado de Mariscos to the carimañolas turned out by Caribbean-coast vendors to the fritters and shaved-ice raspados of the interior-town ferias, and it is one of the most direct ways to read the country's mixed food heritage.

Tropical Fruits of Panama

Panama grows a large variety of tropical fruits, and they show up in the cuisine in two ways: fresh, as the juice, dessert, and snack fruit that sits on every table, and cooked down into the traditional sweets (dulce de papaya and pesada de nance) that are part of the country's dessert and breakfast repertoire. The agricultural base is real: Panama produced 109,000 tons of pineapple in 2018 alongside substantial papaya, mango, and citrus crops.

Vegetarian and Vegan Dining in Panama

Vegetarian and vegan dining in Panama runs on two layers: a dedicated plant-based restaurant scene in Panama City, documented via the HappyCow listing of the city's best vegan restaurants, and the broader plant-based-friendly ingredient base (rice, beans, plantains, yuca, and the tropical-fruit abundance) that runs through the national cuisine and that a vegetarian visitor can eat from even outside the dedicated venues. This page covers both layers, with an explicit note on what operator-level data is and is not sourced.

Wine, Cocktails, and Beverages of Panama

Panama's beverage landscape runs from the Boquete-highland coffee that is the country's signature hot drink, through the fresh-fruit juices (licuados) that accompany every lunch, to a set of traditional cold drinks (saril, chicheme, resbaladera) and the alcoholic base of rum, Seco Herrerano, and beer. This page covers the non-beer side of the country's drinking, with the beer tradition treated on its own page.

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