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Panama City: Casco Viejo Cooking Class & Market Tour

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Free cancellationTravelers' pick

1/11

Duration4h 30m

GroupUp to 8

LanguagesEN · ES

Mobile ticketAccepted

You'll Cook Five Panamanian Dishes After Shopping Where Locals Actually Buy Fish

You shop two working markets in Casco Viejo with a local guide, select fresh ingredients, then cook five classic Panamanian dishes in a hands-on class. The chef teaches you techniques for tamales and carimañolas while explaining the herbs and spices unique to Panama. You finish with a sit-down lunch of what you cooked, plus complimentary drinks. The whole experience runs four hours and adapts to gluten-free, vegan, and vegetarian diets.

4h 30m

Step-by-step itinerary

Start at Restaurante El Nacional
Walk to Mercado de Mariscos
Select fresh fish for ceviche
Walk to Mercado San Felipe Neri
Choose meats, fruits, and vegetables
Return to cooking studio at El Nacional
Prepare five course Panamanian meal
Learn to make tamale and carimañola
Enjoy sit down lunch with local drinks

The Experience

The guide was supposed to meet us at Restaurante El Nacional at 9am, but she arrived at 8:45 with coffee and a laugh about the market vendors who'd already been working for three hours. That's the first thing you notice about this cooking class in Casco Viejo — it's not staged. You're walking into the real Mercado de Mariscos, Panama's largest seafood market, where fishermen unload catches from both the Pacific and Atlantic every single day, and your guide is pointing out which corvina will actually work for ceviche instead of which one looks prettiest for a photo. The market is loud and a bit chaotic, vendors calling out prices, ice melting on concrete, and you're there picking your own ingredients with someone who knows exactly what to look for.

After the seafood market, you walk a short distance to Mercado San Felipe Neri, where the organized chaos shifts — now it's meats, fruits, vegetables, local herbs you've never heard of. Your guide explains what makes Panamanian seasoning different, what grows here, why certain spice combinations matter. Then you head back to the cooking studio at El Nacional with your haul, and the actual class begins. You'll make five dishes from scratch: ceviche with the fish you picked, carimañola (mashed yucca stuffed with seasoned meat), pollo guisado (stewed chicken with local herbs), tamale típica wrapped in plantain leaves, and plátano en tentación for dessert. The chef teaching you has generations of knowledge — you learn the technique for wrapping a tamale properly, how to stuff a carimañola so it holds together, what the corn masa should feel like.

The whole thing takes four hours, and dietary preferences are built in from the start. If you're vegetarian, vegan, or gluten-free, the dishes adapt — the carimañola gets a different filling, the tamale uses different ingredients, nothing feels like a compromise. At the end, you sit down to lunch with what you just cooked, and there's complimentary local drinks included: sodas, juices, beers, cocktails, wine. You're eating in the restaurant where the morning started, tasting food you made yourself, in the colonial heart of Panama City, and it doesn't feel like a tourist activity because it isn't one.

What’s included

Your four hours include the guided walk through Mercado de Mariscos and Mercado San Felipe Neri in Casco Viejo, cold bottled water to start, the hands-on cooking class where you prepare five Panamanian dishes, a sit-down lunch featuring the food you cooked, and complimentary local drinks — sodas, juices, beers, cocktails, and wine.

Good to know

Pets welcomePublic transport nearby

Operated by Panama Day Trips

Is this one for you?Book this if you want to cook real Panamanian food with someone who knows it, not just taste it — the market shopping is what makes the menu personal instead of preset, and the four-hour format fits a morning or afternoon without eating up your whole day.