SERVING ON THE PURA VIDA GARDEN TERRACE . . . SPECIAL MENUS

Welcome to the Garden Terrace - the Pura Vida is happy to create special menues for special occasions. If you have a party of 10 or more and have some special requests for a tropical candlelit open air garden dinner that you won't soon forget email us your ideas. This is one such meal - our New Years Eve Dinner around the Globe.

Our first course was from the chilly north, a Russian Latke Appetizer . . . served with creme fraische, lump fish caviar and a shot of nearly frozen Absolut Vodka.

Latke prep in the Cocina The Latke hueco is in small part due to the well known Latke thief of Pura Vida (yours truly)!

This delicious treat was followed by a South East Asia tasting Sup Mang Cua SaiGon - a corn and asparagus chowder topped with snow crab Chinese Five-Spice Jumbo Prawn deep fried in the shell Bun Cha HaNoi pork meat ball served on a bed of rice noodles, pickled carrots and mint leaves and a cucumber/radish/ginger Champagne Sangria tasting

From our part of the world we next did a Ceviche de Corvina This is our Costa Rican favorite - Corvina (you will know it as Sea Bass) marinaded in lime and other secret spices served with a nice Colio Pinot Grigio from Italy.
And what should a New Years main course be but our Norte Americano style Roast Turkey This was done with a Tico twist - a rich Tamarind glaze complimented the mini green beans lightly stir fried and the roasted potatoes. Some cranberry sauce on the side to compliment the turkey for traditionalists. This was served with a Trivento Cabernet Malbec Reserva from Argentina.
To conclude from our European roots we did a Dark Chocolate Souffle with vanilla ice cream served with a Concha y Toro Brut Champagne and of course our delicious Costa Rican El Rey Green coffee.

NEW YEARS EVE AROUND THE WORLD - a celebration of the old . . .

Yes the dinner was excellent and the company perfect - a celebration of the old and a welcome to the new is somehow encapsulated in this excerpt from a delightful short story about a girl from the north, bitten by a snake, and her experiences in Alajuela (she enjoyed her stay enormously).

"When I was in the Hospital in Alajuela I didn’t have to do anything except stay in bed all day. here in the mountains, the women like me don’t believe me when I tell them this. The women like me say it can’t be true , that it couldn’t happen. But it really did!

It was really, really beautiful. They even gave me honey as sweet as the bees hide in the heart of rotten trees, and they served it to me on a plate so pretty that I brought one of them back and Papa hung it over the gate to our rancho . . . I’ve never had any bad feelings for that snake that almost killed me. Sometimes I even put my foot into some clumps of dead reed roots, right up to the knee, hoping another bite will make them run me all the way to the hospital in Alajuela. Alajuela, oh how pretty you are!

. . . There (in Alajuela) the women like me don’t know anything about anything. Not how to cook, or wash clothes or get the firewood, or cut bananas, or row a boat, and on top of all that they cry! They don’t know how to walk in the mountains and they don’t even know what a mountain is. Ah but what dresses they have, and what Mamas!

                     From The Girl Who Came From The Moon, by Jose L. Sanchez.

The old hospital was closed just this last year - 2006. It has been converted into the offices of the Costa Rican "social security" - you can see the old building at the north end of the city of Alajuela.

The new regional hospital was opened the year before - a huge and modern building now acting as the entrance to Alajuela as you enter on the south side of town. The old and the new are 2km close but so far apart they make you wonder about the future. Girls who came from the moon are still a part of the lovely rural culture that makes up life in Costa Rica.

How would this story play out today?