Discover the surprising cuisine of this Guatemalan town

Livingston is not an island, but it exists so separately from the rest of Guatemala that locals use the word ‘mainland’ to mean everywhere beyond its boundaries. Triple-isolated on the east coast by rainforest, river and saltwater, this small fishing town is cut off from the national road network and only accessible by boat. It used to be the country’s main seaport on the Caribbean, but that role shifted south east long ago to the larger Puerto Barrios, at the far end of Amatique Bay, and Livingston has been somewhat cut adrift.

I arrive hungry, on a small charter vessel, via the river mouth of the Río Dulce. The captain recommends Happy Fish, a wooden bar and restaurant that looks like a Wild West saloon, perched on the pier where he ties up the boat. At dusk, he tells me, it becomes a busy nightclub.

But it’s barely afternoon, and the place has a relaxed feel, with a few early birds having taken the dockside tables for lunch. Everyone seems to have ordered the house special, tapado. It’s a traditional seafood dish, served as a full meal in three parts: a rich soup of coconut milk, shrimp and plantains; a whole fried palometa, a ubiquitous fish of the Caribbean coast; and a side of rice and beans.

I visit the kitchen to see how it’s made and find chef María Luisa Cobos in her cap and apron. Working over a gas stove in the midday heat, she adds the fruit and shellfish to a pot of thick liquid, which has turned reddish with achiote (annatto), the staple spice and colouring of Guatemalan cooking. Others may have their own ways of making tapado, but María claims hers is the only correct one — the recipe developed here and passed down from her mother and grandmother.

Custom dictates you eat tapado slowly, ideally with a cold beer and a fresh, warm coconut bread roll to mop up the broth. So that’s what I do, taking my time. Then, I pop in to see owner Walder Veliz at the other, older branch of Happy Fish, a smaller venue with a similar pioneer-kitchen feel that he’s run for more than 40 years in the centre of town.

Walder considers the food of his home port a measure of its isolation from ‘mainland’ Guatemala. The rest of the country’s cuisine relies heavily on chicken, beef, stuffed chillies and corn tortillas, sharing certain dishes with Central American neighbours. Here in Livingston, they eat more like Caribbean islanders. “We use so much more fish, coconut, plantain and green banana,” he says.

The ingredients come from the surrounding waters and plantations, and the community works with that bounty. The recipes — tapado, as well as other popular foods like cassava bread, banana tamales and tomato-based ‘boil-up’ sauce with dumplings and fried snapper — are particular favourites of the Garifuna people.

This ethnic group accounts for some 4,000 of Livingston’s residents, around a quarter of the town’s total population. They are descended from the African slaves who escaped a shipwreck off the island of St Vincent in the 1600s. Building families with native Caribs, they created a distinct ethnicity that then dispersed to Belize, Nicaragua, Honduras and here, on the edge of Guatemala. In their troubled passage from one enclave to another, the Garifuna were often subject to the cruelties of foreign naval powers and marauding pirates.

That history is marked all over Livingston. The town itself was named after 19th-century American politician Edward Livingston, whose legal codes became the basis for local government. But the main street pays homage to quasi-mythical hero Marco Sánchez Díaz, a Black Haitian soldier credited with leading the first Garifuna here from Honduras.

Walking up that thoroughfare today, I pass tropical birds perched over housefronts painted with wild animal murals, and stop outside a little fruit and veg store owned by Leti Fuentes, who sits back in a deckchair. She also sells her homemade banana bread by the slice. Moist, fragrant, nutty and slightly chewy, it’s the best I’ve ever tasted, and I tell her so. She replies, “I know it is.”

A bit further up the street is Buga Mama, a Maya-run restaurant with a wooden deck out over the water. Operating as part of the Ak’Tenamit project, the business gives Indigenous students on-the-job training in the service industry. Manager Wendy Tzalan comes from the Mopan people, a sub-group of the Maya, and was herself a beneficiary of the programme. “I wanted to pass on my knowledge,” she says, “and help these kids become what they want.”

She shows me into a kitchen filled with interns, all prepping menu items that deploy local seafood across an intercontinental range of quesadillas, pizzas and rice dishes. Much of what’s available from the day’s catch is sold a few blocks away, where the street opens onto a portside plaza known as Garifuna Park.

That fish is also fried in the open at tented market stalls, which fill the square with smoke. Between a coconut vendor and a busy cantina stands Artisina Garifuna, an al fresco health bar and natural pharmacy made of crates and cargo nets. There, bearded ‘bush doctor’ Carlos Flores Garden trades in remedies concocted from homegrown medicinal plants — star vine, cinnamon, sarsaparilla — and laid out in apothecary bottles.

His signature recipe is a potent distillation of 27 roots that he calls guifitti, and which he claims can cure anything from diabetes to infertility. He also blends it into a rum that he sells by the shot, which smells and tastes like a barn fire. Only after I down it does he tell me that the alcohol mostly cancels out the health benefits. “Nah, the rum just burns,” he says. “It’s good though, right?”

Livingston comes to an end another five minutes’ walk away, at a short arc of white sand where the blues of sea and river meet. Local band Aceite de Coco (‘Coconut Oil’) are on the beach performing Garifuna music — an Afro-Caribbean form of drumming and chanting derived from ancestral rituals.

A dancer named Kimara shimmies in a dress screen-printed with the poster for the classic zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, while bandmates Chuleta, Alfonso and Kyoto play bongos and maracas, and sing in the Garifuna language. They sound cheerful, but the lyrics tell of historical heartbreaks and bloody revenges against pirates. Or so translates Chuleta — the chattiest of the group — when they take a break at the hut-like beach bar La Playita de Barique.

The place is new, opened late last year by Claudia Monroy and her husband Robin. It’s a prime spot, says Claudia, her smile balanced somewhere between pride and modesty — the sand acts as a kind of landing strip where locals leave their boats to shop or eat in town. Now, they stop here, too, for fresh-made bar snacks, which draw on the same tropical flavours that have sustained the Garifuna for centuries. The food, the music, the light on the water — all conspire to tell you Livingston is an island, even though you know it’s not.