Sancocho de res

The strangest plate I have been handed here so far, and one of the best.

Sancocho is not soup the way we know soup. It is a whole lunch spread across the table: a deep bowl of broth with a piece of beef in it, a bowl of rice beside it, and a piece of boiled plantain to go with it. A Czech sits over it for a moment not knowing where to start, because rice does not belong in soup and plantain certainly does not belong with meat.

It does. A piece of plantain into the broth, a spoon of rice after it, and suddenly it makes sense. The combination stays odd exactly as long as it takes you to try it.

There is a lot of coriander in it and you taste it on the first spoonful. If you hate the stuff there is no way around it here: it goes into almost everything, and sancocho without it would not be sancocho.

Where I ate it

At a small local restaurant in Parque Arví, outside under a roof.

The kitchen was outside as well, a few steps from the tables, and the smoke from it drifted right across the terrace. At home that would be a complaint; here it is part of lunch. It smells of wood and meat from the moment you sit down, and the food then tastes different from food carried out of a kitchen behind a door.