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A Guatemalan Cuisine and Cooking Experience
I found this incredible restaurant experience, interactive dining, and cultural experience in Antigua, Guatemala, called El Comalote Restaurant. A Comal is where you make tortillas. Whenever you see people making tortillas, standing around this kind of oven, clapping back and forth with the tortillas, having fun, that oven is called a Comal. So that’s the name of the restaurant, El Comalote, and this restaurant is a whole experience itself.
El Comalote Restaurant
Obviously, it’s a play on the word, and this is an incredible experience. The woman that owns it really wants to bring out the cultural history of Guatemalan food and also really focus on corn, elote maize, whatever you want to call it. It is literally the backbone and heart of all Mayan Guatemalan foods. Today with the whole GMO issue, she works specifically with mainly organic, real corn farmers. It’s amazing the number of different types of corn there are: Red, black, yellow, white, and so on and so forth.
El Comalote Interactive Dining Experience
She brings it all to you in this restaurant, this interactive experience where it’s a five-course dish, and she tells you first about the history and brings out all these different dishes.
You also make your own tortillas, and when you make your own tortillas, you get the feel of what it is to make these tortillas because it takes time. We all stand around, and her cooks are traditional Guatemalan cooks, and they are incredible, like the kind that really know their cuisine.
You could order either vegetarian. You could have the vegetarian experience or the regular experience. We obviously went for the vegetarian experience.
When you’re doing those tortillas, and it was interesting because I wasn’t sure how my kids would enjoy it, but they loved it. They actually said this was one of their favorite restaurants because they were able to participate in it and make food. Plus, the food was familiar, but they didn’t know its origins and the roots of it.
It was really great to see my Guatemala husband, like, just being so nostalgic because it’s from him when he was being raised on a farm in a rural area of Guatemala. This is exactly what they do with the tortillas, with the kind of foods they serve, all of that. It just really brought that out. Funny enough, it was supposed to be my birthday celebration and my family was saying thank you to me for finding this place. That’s how incredible it was.
I really recommend visiting.
Regular Experience
It is an actual restaurant and a tortilla place is where they make tortillas. So you can go in just for the regular food or just to buy tortillas, and they have the best nachos as well. They’re very fresh, homemade nachos.
How long the experience is?
But I would really recommend going for the experience. You need to make a reservation for that. It’s about two and a half hours full experience from sitting down, from drinking to dessert, and the whole dining experience. It’s amazing, something that I truly, really recommend when visiting Guatemala.
My Take
First, you’ll get so much more out of what you’re eating, understanding the culture, understanding the traditional food. If you think about it, the majority of cultures, all start around the kitchen, they all start around food. So this really brings it out because it’s a lot about medicinal, it’s a lot about the Mayan heritage. It’s about Guatemala and that whole area and agriculture.
It’s just you’ll learn so much more, and it’s not done in a boring way. Furthermore, it’s done in a really interesting, engaging, interactive, fun way. I really give a lot of credit to Gabby, the owner, for making such an amazing experience. So please find it.
Information about El Comalote Restaurant
- Website: https://elcomalote.com/
- Address: 4a calle oriente, 44C, Antigua Guatemala
- Phone: +502 4245 1032
- Email: amo@elcomalote.com
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