Welcome to Park Cafe
A magical space in the center of Costa Rica's capital. For unique architectural pieces, furniture and objets d'art, a discovery of treasures to enjoy for a lifetime.
Louise Introducing Park Cafe
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Our restaurant with Two Michelin star chef Richard Neat is available for private lunch and dinners for 6-20 people with individually crafted menus and matching wines. For all our food and beverage proposals please look at the page below.
Please write to us for information.
Some of our dishes
Garden, or in the aisle.
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After a great summer at the beach with our day club and cookery courses, I am also re-starting the cookery courses at Park Cafe in the capital, San Jose. You can find the details below.
Great Video from last gig at Villa TAI
Address.
Sabana Norte, 50 metros Norte de Rosti Pollos, Calle 48,
San Jose, Costa Rica
The Antiques Store is open Monday to Saturday. 09h30-17h00
Tel. (506) 2290 6324
Whatsapp : (506) 8562 2390
or preferably lolaantiques@yahoo.com (antiques)richardneat@hotmail.com (dining experiences)
Our social media sites
Please take a look at our exciting new platform www.neatandchaos.com
Instagram: #parkcafecostarica
Original Indian Doors
Park Cafe Designs using Indonesian carved panels
Casual Areas
Columns and side cabinets by Park Cafe Antiques
Indian Tribal Door
"Un espacio magico en la capital de Costa Rica.
At the moment the Antique Shop does not accept payments with credit cards.
Richard's Book.
Observations from the Kitchen is an
autobiographical adventure story that unfolds upon the metaphoric battlefield
of a chess board, a place The Cook uses to describe and make sense of a
lifetime spent in service to gastronomy.
Set within the sweatshop kitchens
that have been his home, it is a journey that takes the reader from the
frenetic chaos of the London's West End to the narcissistic playgrounds of the
Cote d'Azur, through amazing India and magical Marrakech to the snow-covered
domes of the Kremlin before ending in the steamy jungles of beautiful Costa
Rica.
The Cook invites different
companions, the people who have touched him, made his life something other than
mundane, to join him 'a table', where, whilst preparing his signature
dishes, they discuss such themes as Ambition, Loyalty and Contentment and
whether such ideas are comprehensible to anyone other than the person who
utters them.
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Tico Times book review. April 2014.
Richard Neat, the cerebral chef over at San José’s Park Café, has a penchant for chess, Russian novels, philosophy and political manifestos. Now he’s whipped up perhaps his most complex dish in the form of a self-published reminiscence centered on “life at the center of the gastronomic revolution.”
Neat weaves in tantalizing snippets of how he prepares his
signature dishes, as well as vivid travelogues covering his nomadic life over
four decades, from London to France to India to Morocco to Costa Rica.
The introspective, existential themes of the book are played
out against the strategic framework of an ongoing chess game and fashioned
after a Platonic dialogue, with the chef debating such heady topics as
ambition, faith, hubris and loyalty, with various opposing interlocutors. Along
the way we are also treated to scathing but entertaining rants against greedy,
over-taxing governments, and — my favorite — poisonous, overweening restaurant
critics.
As a non-chess player, the metaphoric strategy was lost on
me. What I did enjoy were the insights Neat provides into what it takes to
aspire to and reach the pinnacle of artistry and craftsmanship in any field –
in his case, gastronomy, and the golden grail of Michelin stardom.
The achievement of two Michelin stars in his London
restaurant Pied à Terre, along with the only Michelin star awarded to an
Englishman cooking in France, for his Neat Cannes restaurant, certainly
qualifies the chef as an expert in what it takes to succeed in the gastronomic
world. Much of the book deals with the collision between the forces of
creativity and the high-stakes economics of the restaurant business.
Each chapter features the preparation of a Neat signature
dish, starting with smoked foie gras with onion purée, and ending
with an incredibly complicated braised pig’s head with pumpkin purée.
Neat makes it all seem so deceptively simple. But these complicated “preps”
make you realize how much training, experience and talent it takes to attain
Neat’s level of creativity and craftsmanship.
The pressures to “create new temptations to amuse my
ever-fickle audience” and to become a “faultless, fanatical craftsman” are
neatly balanced by the pleasure Neat takes in the “beasts and vegetables that
were reared and grown with care,” which, he says “oblige a cook to treat them
with sufficient reverence.”
There is a lot to digest in Neat’s observations, on a number
of levels. As a food aficionado, the lasting impression I took away was the
realization that, along with skill, a lot of thinking goes into haute cuisine.
All those decades Neat has spent in the kitchen were not just about producing
food to eat, but also food for thought.
“Observations From the Kitchen“ by Richard Neat
is available on-line for $7.99 at http://bookstore.authorhouse.com/Products/SKU-000683863/Default.aspx. Or
visit Neat’s blog at www.parkcafecostarica.blogspot.com.
I had hoped to have a professionally
edited and photographed book to offer and even imagined that I had secured the
help of a large and prestigious literary agency whose M.D encouraged me over
the summer with the following assessment ........
OBSERVATIONS FROM THE KITCHEN is rather
wonderful. You’ve created an extraordinary work here, and a beautifully crafted
one. I found myself thinking that every creative should read it regardless of
what industry they’re in or skillset they’re mastering. It raises such
important questions, and is so refreshingly forthright about them.
This work is unique in many ways, yet you refer
to OBSERVATIONS as a novel. That brings with it certain assumptions and
expectations. I’m not sure that this is where it should sit. It’s such a smart,
thoughtful, brave discussion about some really difficult (dare I say
unresolvable) issues. It strikes me as a meditation, a parable, an exploration
of the creative journey. If a reader comes to the work with that sort of lens,
I think they would get a lot more out of it than if they came to it with
“novel” in mind.
Unfortunately, the company decided
that the book was impossible to 'position' so I am left with offering an
amateurishly edited book accompanied by my own home photographs. I do hope
however, that you might still enjoy it.
If you would like a copy you can
find it at the following link.
