Eating and Drinking

The Dominican cuisine is very varies in hotels and better restaurants, offering meats, fish and seafood but the choice in simple restaurants is rather limited but never the less very tasty.

A lot of bars offer ham and cheese sandwiches for breakfast but also toast and marmalade and scrambled eggs. Lunch hour is European but stalls, commodores offer simple food along the roads. These commodores are usually a one-man / woman operation and often there is only one menu available, consisting mostly of stew or rice and beans with red sauce, plantains ( platanos ) bananas ( guineos ), sweet potatos ( Batata ) and cassava ( yucca ) enrich most meals. Menus with meat re mostly based on chicken ( pollo ), pork ( carne de cerdo ) or goat ( Carne de chivo ).

Dinner is somewhat later. Those who want to eat out again often go to a “ Pica-Pollo”, a mobile food stall located at a strategically important corner that offers barbecued chicken in the open air. Traveling hashers sell seafood, such as sea snails, oysters or crawfish on easy beaches. Many restaurants offer fish but tourists should abstain from April to September because there is a danger of a very bas poisoning.

If you are thirsty, you always have a choice of various soft drinks and juices. Beer is very popular and is taken ice cold. The most famous brands are Presidente, Quisgueya, Bohemia and Soberana. The Caribbean is always associated with exotic drinks based on rum but Dominicans prefer their rum pure. A large quantity is consumed in the evening hours and on week-ends. It is often sold to tourists as “Vitamin B” ( B1-Brugal, BZ- Barcelo, B3 Bermudez, the three largest brands of rum ) . On the beaches, sellers offer their fresh coconuts. They are still wrapped in their green shell and not completely ripe. The coconut water is “evicted” with rum and then sold as “ coco-loco”