Meeting Miss Edith

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When traveling, sometimes you meet a person whose memory you carry with you throughout the trip and back home with you. Miss Edith was this person during our last minute trip to Costa Rica over a long holiday weekend.

Caribbean Cahuita

Due to the short nature of our trip and the fact that we were flying in and out of San José, we decided to visit the southeastern coast of Costa Rica. This region of Costa Rica doesn’t see as many tourists as the western coast and is more rural. One of the things we were excited about was the area’s mix of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean influences that set it apart from the rest of the country. To this end, while we were in Cahuita we chose to go on an eating adventure and search out Miss Edith’s for dinner, a local Caribbean restaurant known to have great jerk dishes.

Got Lost Going Off the Beaten Path

Cahuita isn’t a big place and we had a vague idea where the restaurant was in relation to town, so we assumed we wouldn’t get lost finding it. As so many travelers have been before… we were wrong. Walking towards town from our cabina, we missed the turn that would take us where we wanted to go, and instead kept walking down the main road into town where all the other restaurants and bars were located. Once we realized we had passed it, we turned around and eventually found the correct road that we’d walked past in the dark. It’s worth noting that we were walking around lost in the dark, but at no time did we feel unsafe.

Stuffing Our Faces

When we finally arrived, we were the only patrons in the restaurant and our server only spoke a little English, leaving me to use my barely conversational Spanish to place our orders. I ordered the jerk chicken and my husband ordered the jerk fish while we shared a side of potatoes stewed in garlic. The potatoes were cooked to perfect tenderness in their rich garlicky sauce. They literally melted in our mouths as our forks fought each other for our next bite. The jerk sauce on our meals was deliciously complex with a decent amount of heat. We were both enjoying our meals immensely, even though my hubby had to wipe some sweat off his brow more than once. I, naturally, picked on him a bit for not being able to handle the heat (while surreptitiously using my napkin to wipe my own face when he wasn’t looking). 

Quote of the Trip

An older lady sitting at the next table overheard our joking about the heat and interrupted to say that the food was hot in order to ‘sweat out the malaria.’ (For the authentic experience, please do yourself a favor and read that phrase in a Caribbean accent closer to Jamaican than to Tico Spanish.) The three of us laughed over that for a few minutes and it became a joke for the rest our trip. Since her English was much better than our server’s we continued chatting with her, and it turns out this was Miss Edith herself! 

Delighted with the chance encounter, we proceeded to profusely compliment the food and strike up a conversation. We learned that her niece lives in New York City and she had visited there before. It was so fun to meet someone in a lesser known corner of a small country who had visited somewhere so near to our own home in Buffalo, NY. Throughout our dinner, we had noticed a crowd of people at the open air building next door. According to Miss Edith, this was a local church service and many parishioners came over to the restaurant afterward for dinner. The completion of our meal and the arrival of so many new customers marked the end of our visit with Miss Edith. Contentedly full from our delicious dinner, we made our way back to our cabina to get some sleep before our white water rafting adventure the next day.

Miss Edith’s was definitely a wonderful local spot to get some delicious Caribbean food in Cahuita, and worth the time to find it in the dark.

Why Miss Edith Has Stuck with Us

As an after note, allow me to explain why to this day, the ‘sweat out the malaria’ quote from Miss Edith has remained a joke between my husband and I. He developed an intense, though short-lived, fever within two weeks of returning home, and actually needed to be tested for malaria. His fever fit the symptoms, he’d been bitten by mosquitoes while we wandered around Cahuita searching for Miss Edith’s, and we hadn’t gotten any anti-malarial tablets for our trip. Luckily his test came back negative, and his symptoms did not continue.

However, learn a lesson from us and do your homework before traveling. Look up the specific areas you’re visiting to make sure what vaccines and medications you might need. I left that research up to him for this trip and he only looked up Costa Rica in general without checking the specific regions we were visiting. We credit Miss Edith’s jerk recipe for preventing us from getting malaria and going forward, I do the medical research before we travel.

Read more about our adventures in Costa Rica!

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