Chifrijo.

Chifrijo is the rare national dish with a name attached to it. It is widely credited to Miguel Cordero, who began serving it at his bar in Tibás, on the northern edge of San José, in the early 1990s, and it spread through the country's bocas culture — the tradition of small plates served with drinks — so fast that within a decade it was on menus everywhere. Cordero later registered the name as a trademark, which produced years of legal argument with restaurants that considered it public property by then. The courts and the public have largely landed on the practical side: everyone sells it, everyone calls it chifrijo, and its inventor's claim is acknowledged more in stories than in licensing.

That recency is unusual and worth noticing. Most of what a country eats accretes over centuries with no author; chifrijo has a decade, a neighbourhood and a person. It also explains its structure. This is not a peasant dish adapted from scarcity but a bar snack engineered for drinking: salty, crunchy, sharp with lime, and served in a bowl so a table of people can each have their own without sharing cutlery.

The components themselves are older than the dish. Chicharrón — pork simmered in its own fat until tender, then fried hard until the outside shatters — is Central American everywhere. Frijoles tiernos, red beans kept loose in their broth rather than drained, are a Costa Rican staple. Pico de gallo of tomato, onion, coriander and lime is a shared regional habit. What Cordero did was stack them. Purists in San José will tell you the beans must be red and slightly soupy, that the rice goes on the bottom and not the top, and that avocado is optional but expected. Beyond that, every bar makes it slightly differently, and the version below aims for the standard bar build rather than any single establishment's.