Some of you have been asking what we eat in Bolivia. A lot and rather unhealthy, I always answered.
Now there is a video to illustrate what I meant with that. Cochabamba is known as the culinary capital of Bolivia, but it may well also be the capital of diabetes.
A lunch menu at a Bolivian restaurant (soup, main course, maybe a dessert, and a bottle of cola) costs around 3 dollars. No surprise then that I hardly cook myself. Obviously there are restaurants catering to tourists (or snobs) which are more expensive, but I prefer the small restaurants that suddenly open up everywhere around lunch time. Sometimes it is only someone’s garden or garage with a few tables and plastic chairs. There will be a sign in the street advertising the menu of the day. You can’t get anything else, there will be the same food on every table.
At night, chefs are popping up at every street corner, putting up a grill or a gas stove or pulling a huge pot of soup on four wheels behind tem. Each of them too has only one specialty, with some of these small businesses preparing and selling it at the same street corner for years. For example, close to my home, at the corner of America/Bolivar, you can get trancapechos (you see them from minute 2:45 in the video on) as long as they have enough bread, burgers and eggs, sometimes until after midnight. Because there is only one dish, you simply order by mentioning the number of huge burgers which you want. Uno is absolutely sufficient, and for 1.50 dollars you will get full. I often pass by that stall after my late-night run in Abraham-Lincoln-Park.
Interestingly to someone from Germany, Paulaner beer is very popular. There is even a “Paulaner Fan-Shop“ in Cochabamba, where you can buy beer mugs. For those who prefer the beer from northern Germany, there is “Bierhaus Dortmund“.
Between all the unhealthy options, I have finally found one vegetarian restaurant.
The Happy Hermit 