Antigua really has quite a good culinary scene with a number of high quality international restaurants, refreshingly owned & run by both locals & ex pats. What it is however somewhat lacking in is restaurants serving good quality Guatemalan food. However given that it is such a tourist town, and tourists love to taste the typical dishes of the places they visit (well I do at least.) I think this is a definite gap in the market- restaurateurs take note!

I did however visit the nearby town of San Bartolo for good cheap local food. I also had the pleasure of experiencing Guatemalan food at its best; home cooked and served with love with my host family. The grandma of my house took it as a matter of pride to introduce me to some of the best Guatemalan dishes. Let me give you a (very) brief overview of the most important or typical Guatemalan foods.

Rice & beans

So these are the staple foods for the whole country. For poorer families they are the meal. For those better off they are accompanied by eggs for breakfast and possibly meat for dinner. Rice is pretty self-explanatory plain boiled white rice- nothing earth shattering. However beans, oh my days! I never realized there were so many options. Beans are to Guatemalans what potatoes are to the Irish- worshipped in all forms! Frijoles refritos (refried black beans) could be my new favourite thing here, except of course guacamole which needs no introduction.

Tortillas

These bad boys are the accompaniment to every meal, just as a loaf of bread is to us (well more so in the past.)They can be made of flour, corn or wheat. It's mainly corn ones served here and they come in 3 colours (white, yellow & black/blue) depending which colour of corn is used to make them. White & yellow are by far the most common but when a batch of black ones are on sale- stand clear as a queue forms rapidly! In Guatemala they are still made the traditional way in homes all over Guatemala or in make shift stands on the side of the road. The woman (invariably women) hack of a small piece from a huge block of dough (which I hope to God is industrially mixed as it would take the strength of a horse- but I would not underestimate these women) and expertly pat them into small round discs and toss them on a huge hot plate where they cook them on both sides and wrap them up in stacks of about 12 for the awaiting customers. So you usually eat warm freshly cooked tortillas with your food mmm!

Tamales

These were traditionally served at Christmas (24th December here) however they are now served throughout the year, particularly on Saturdays. They are about hot dog sized and shaped, made from starchy corn based dough and usually filled with meat and chilies. They are steamed & then served wrapped in a leaf. To be honest there is nothing I can compare them to; they just need to be tried!

Drinks

Special drinks include horchata, which is quite a thick rice based drink flavoured with cinnamon & sometimes vanilla. Atole is a corn flour based drink again flavoured with cinnamon or vanilla but served hot and with a lot of sugar. None of these were a regular tipple of mine.

So with so much tasty and relatively cheap food available it was something of a disappointment to see the Big Mac being treated as a delicacy, with lots of local families (made all the more poignant when wearing traditional dress) frequenting Mc Donalds & Pollo Campero (the Guate version of KFC). It shouldn't be a shock as that's what progress means right? Earning more money so you can buy the things TV & marketing tells you, you should. So here they were 'progressing' in their droves, spending what could be a week's wages for some families taking the entire family (Guatemala has the highest fertility rate in Latin America with an average of 5 kids per family) out for a special treat.

It's obviously not just Mc Donalads; Coca Cola also has such a strangle hold here, well really I suppose all the Americas. I remember being horrified when I first arrived in Mexico and saw a Coca Cola billboard advertising a pregnant woman holding a nice refreshing glass bottle of Coke- hmm just what the doctor ordered for your baby eh! But drinking Coca Cola & other fizzy drinks is ridiculously common here, probably not helped by the fact that in some places it's cheaper than water!

I should probably get of my high horse as it's really not that different in Europe. Ok we know fizzy drinks are bad for us and we (generally) try to limit kids intake & as adults are slightly more savvy during daylight hours, but at night we then drink probably just as much and throw in a load of alcohol into the mix just for good measure. It's just disappointing to see a country with less disposable income throwing so much of it into the hands of a huge corporation and getting a load of health issues for it in return (diabetes is a real problem in Guatemala and a lot of Central America.) But given that for a lot of people alcohol is too expensive, or socially less acceptable (older women generally don't drink at all and it's only really in more affluent families of this generation that girls drink), if fast food & fizzy drinks are their only vices who am I to judge! So…. buen provecho!