Dominican cooking is criollo, simple and very consistent: Spanish base, African technique and Taíno ingredients, with rice as the backbone of nearly everything.
La bandera
La bandera dominicana is the national lunch and is eaten literally daily across the country: white rice, stewed beans, meat — braised chicken, beef or pork — and salad, sometimes with tostones or sweet plantain. The colours evoke the flag, hence the name. It is the midday menu in any comedor.
Mangú and breakfast
Mangú is boiled green plantain mashed with its cooking water and oil, topped with pickled red onion. Served with fried egg, fried cheese and fried salami it becomes los tres golpes, the definitive Dominican breakfast. Substantial and addictive.
Sancocho
Sancocho is the dish for occasions: a thick stew with several meats — the seven-meat version being the most ceremonial — and a collection of root vegetables, cassava, yam, taro, pumpkin and plantain. It comes with white rice and avocado. It is what gets cooked when family visits, when it rains, or when there is something to celebrate.
Everything else
From the sea, fish in coconut sauce from the Samaná coast, whole fried fish with tostones eaten on the beach, and chillo criolla-style. From the street, chicharrón, quipes — a legacy of Lebanese migration — empanadas and the fried yaniqueques sold along the malecón.
As sides: tostones (green plantain fried and flattened), mofongo (mashed with crackling and garlic) and casabe, the Taíno cassava flatbread still made exactly as it was five hundred years ago.
Drinks
Dominican coffee is excellent and taken very sweet. The fruit is a reason to travel in itself: passion fruit, soursop, papaya, sapote, mango. Fresh juices are sold on every corner.
Mamajuana is the most distinctive drink: a bottle of tree bark, herbs and roots cured with rum, red wine and honey. All sorts of properties are attributed to it, and it has a strong herbal taste worth sampling before buying. The Dominican rums — Brugal, Barceló, Bermúdez — are the local trinity.
Where to eat
Look for comedores: simple neighbourhood places serving la bandera at midday for very little. That is where people eat and where the food is more honest than any resort buffet.
Portions and timing
Lunch is the main meal, eaten between noon and two, and portions are generous. Dinner tends to be lighter and later. Comedores usually stop serving the bandera by mid-afternoon, so plan around midday rather than evening if you want the real thing.