Eat List: El Salvador
Includes San Salvador, the West & the Coast.
The improved security situation has changed the way you can eat and travel around El Salvador. No longer limited to resort areas and particular neighborhoods in San Salvador, the country’s cuisine is more accessible to experience than it has ever been.
Bordering Guatemala and Honduras, the country often gets left out of Central America’s culinary conversation, yet the foundations of its food system that were built around the Olmec and later Pibil peoples, can still be seen, despite more than a century of dysfunction brought on by the coffee oligarchy, military rule, civil war and mass migration, among other things. In San Salvador, you’ll find a bustling, modern metropolis, with elegant restaurants and buzzing markets hidden within a sea of fast food and international chains. On the coast, the seas are rich and can be enjoyed through countless typical seafood spots, including one particularly famous one set right in a riverbed. In the mountainous coffee lands to the west, there’s an indigenous night market and small restaurants that have passed down their secrets from generation to generation, outlasting the violence and natural disasters that tried to come between them.
Rather than all concentrated in the capital, many of El Salvador’s best culinary excursions are quite spread out. It’s said you can get anywhere in the country in 45 minutes and while traffic doesn’t always make that a reality, it’s relatively easy to get around by car and visit a good swath of the country on a short trip.
Note: This map is missing Eastern El Salvador, around the San Miguel and Gulf of Fonseca areas. Eventually I will get there and update the map.