He handed over a San Lucas “passport”, which included another map of the country with background about each province, and opened the suitcase to reveal an adventurous assortment of appetisers: taro root chips; a cocoa butter sphere containing agua de sapo (a drink made with sugar cane, lime and ginger); mushroom-shaped butter; and a shot of chicheme (a traditional Indigenous fermented purple corn drink).

Over the next two hours, Marenco presented a nine-course tasting menu, each dish paying homage to a different province. With each course, he added insight – from local dish nicknames to stories of how geography shaped cuisine – enriching the menu with personal and cultural context.  

I’d requested the vegetarian menu and began my journey with a punchy ceviche made with green apple and chayote – an alternative to the fish and piangua (black-shelled molluscs) dish – that represented Puntarenas, the province with the longest Pacific coastline. A crispy quinoa croquette atop a delicate coconut milk foam arrived at dusk, the sauce’s spicy, aromatic flavours inspired by Limón, Costa Rica’s Caribbean province. Cartago was depicted with a smoky potato dish – the province’s main agricultural product – topped with “ash” made from burnt onion powder, referencing its volcanic landscape. 

San Lucas opened in 2019, but the project was years in the making. Valverde consulted with multiple experts, including Alejandra Brenes, a psychologist who specialises in gastronomic consumer behaviour and the neuroscience of sensory experiences. For San Lucas, she researched how people react to different stimuli in order to curate the experience for diners and generate curiosity. “For example, temperature, the choice of plates, the way the food is placed on them, the music, the dish’s texture, it all affects our perception of flavour,” she said, describing the end result as “a small gastronomic adventure park”.

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