Gilberto Briceño is the owner of RLT Cuisine, or Road Less Traveled Cuisine, in Playa Potrero, a small beach town in Guancaste, Costa Rica. RLT Cuisine is not a restaurant, but it’s also not not a restaurant. There is a restaurant element to it. Inside his food lab in a commercial building, nowhere near the beach, he has 4 seats inside of the main kitchen. Whenever someone wants to come in, he creates a 9-course meal out of local ingredients for them. But that is just a small fraction of what RLT Cuisine is. It's outdoor pop-up dinners in wild settings, a private chef service, product development, cooking classes and storytelling.
Gilberto spent years staging at some of the best restaurants in the world, learning both the wrong way and the right ways to run a kitchen. He saw the toll that high level kitchens could take on a cook, but that it didn’t have to be that way. Not only is his concept for RLT Cuisine adaptable, going with the flow and making whatever idea work within its boundaries and the limits of the business, but it is kind. There are staff meals provided by a local cook and the idea that everyone working there has equal value.
Social media is also an important part of what Gilberto does. His TikTok videos are great and should be a reference for any small culinary business. They are less of an advertisement about the business and more of just a way for people to stumble onto the way he thinks, which in turn helps his business. It’s also a way to deepen knowledge of cuisine in the area. This is a part of Costa Rica that’s near a Blue Zone, one of just a handful of places on earth where people live the longest because of the local diet, but the widespread development along the coast over the last 10 years is wiping it away even as they market the very concept of blue zones.
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I have been spending a lot of time in Costa Rica over the past decade and it’s a really special place with a complicated history that I can’t really equate to anywhere else. It has the greatest network of accessible small farms in the region, while also having industrial farms that have some of the world’s highest rates of pesticide use. There are incredible local restaurants called sodas, while there are also more terrible, overpriced, ill-conceived tourist restaurants that don’t use local ingredients than anywhere I can think of. Anyway, Gilberto and his pura vida vibes is someone that can help shift the momentum.
Episode #96: Gilberto Briceño