Hola!
Going to be at the Paraiso for four nights in August. Any good dining recommendatins besides Il Novillo? Has anyone eaten dinner at The Lost Iguana or the Arenal Observatory Lodge. We're interested in decent food with some ambiance.Thanks!

P.S. How are the hikes from the Nat'l Park...can you get to the old lava flows/boulders?

Check out my trip report. I talked about several Arenal restaurants. We liked the places with more of a local flare. We aren't big spenders and never ate at any of the hotel restaurants.

LOVED the Lost Iguana,but the restaurant was only OK in our opinion. Nice setting tho. with nice view of the volcano

Just back and enjoyed El Novillo Steakhouse. Good food and was able to sit a watch Arenal do a little bit of it's thing while dinning. Another good choice as recommended by a bartender at Tabacon was El Brasillis or Brasilito Mexican Rest. In La Fortuna across from Lugi's. Really good food.

El Novillo is good, but Costa Rica is not a destination that gourmands around the world are clamoring to get to.

I agree. EL Novillo was wonderful only because of the views. You can't see the volcano from the Nat'l Park but you can from the road. The best view I think is from an observational lookout at Los Lagos. I don't know if you can drive up there if you aren't staying there but you could ask. Although we're hikers we ended up not hiking very much because the Hanging Bridges and Zipline took up our time (also birdwatching and walking around our hotel was actually the best. It's pretty warm too.

Our 2 favorites were Las Brasitas(on the left as soon as you get into town), they had excellent fire-roasted chicken.
Our best meal was at La Choza de Laurel(about an 1/8 mi further on the same side). They also have great chicken but check out their nightly specials that were our favorites of the entire trip.
These places being noted---as one other poster stated--La Fortuna is not a place for gourmands but we loved both these places.

There are some great local restaurants in La Fortuna. Our taxi driver gave us a great recommendation of La Choza del Laurel (my spelling may not be completely accurate). Just a small open air diner along the road, but the food was outstanding!

We stayed at the Lost Iguana and thought their dinners were pretty good for Costa Rica. (Costa Rica isn't known for the food.) The fish and beef dishes were good enough for us to agree to have dinner there twice. If they had been terrrible we would have eaten elsewhere. Skip desert though, I think it's frozen! Good ambience, I like their dining area, no walls, no glass, open to tropical view and volcano view, we even saw some lava flow at dinner (lucky us.) I remember hearing frogs too, adding to the feeling of being somewhere in nature, somewhere unique.

Arenal Observatory Lodge has a decent dinner buffet.

We liked the family-style meal served at Ecotermales, a small family-owned hot springs in Arenal area, outside of town. You need dinner reservations. The food was like good, basic home cooking. The hot springs were nice, smaller than Tabacon, which we decided to avoid.

If you have dinner at the Observatory Lodge, you can't see the volcano through the glass once it's dark because of reflections on the glass. But they have a deck where you can walk outside and see the volcano if you want to leave your table.

The restaurant at Arenal Kioro has really good food. Wonderful pastas -- people go crazy over the carbonara -- good fish dishes too. It's an outdoor restaurant -- doesn't look fancy at all, but it's right in front of the volcano and you'll like the food. After all the rice and beans you'll be eating, it will be nice to have some pasta for a change!

Sandy

Don Rufino's. As you have seen above, there are many great places to dine in La Fortuna and area, but this was good, cheap and friendly. See if Arianna is working and if so, have her make you one of her special coffee drinks after dinner. Its a great place.