Cartagena for first-time visitors

Best restaurants

Cartagena eats in two registers at once: the walled old town and Getsemaní, where Caribbean cooking has been sharpened by tourist money into something more polished, and the broader city where the cooking is older, looser, and aimed at the people who actually live here. This list works across both. It leans on places mapped by the people who walk past them every day — the OpenStreetMap record is, for once, a fair proxy for which kitchens are wired into the neighbourhood — and it favours kitchens that commit to a register and stay there: a Caribbean bistro that does not pretend to be French, a pizzeria that does not pretend to be Neapolitan, a regional grill that does not pretend to be a steakhouse. It is written for a visitor who would rather eat where the cuisine has a postcode than where the menu has a flag, and who is willing to cross the avenue out of the walled city for the sake of a better plate.