Street Pastry · Caribbean-Coast Turnover

Patí

📷 Closely related photo — Photo via Pexels/Unsplash — free for commercial use

This flaky, turmeric-yellow meat pastry isn't originally Costa Rican — it's a direct descendant of the Jamaican beef patty, brought over by Afro-Caribbean railroad and banana workers.

Patí is a crimped, golden-yellow pastry turnover filled with spiced ground beef, a specialty of Costa Rica's Caribbean province of Limón. Street vendors and small bakeries sell them warm, wrapped in paper, as a handheld snack or breakfast on the go.

Why it's made this way: Limón's food culture was shaped by thousands of Jamaican and other West Indian laborers who arrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s to build the railroad and work banana plantations, bringing the beef patty that locals adapted.