At 3,640m La Paz cooks with ingredients almost nowhere else grows: freeze-dried chuño, tarwi, coca leaf and Amazon fish hauled up from the Yungas. Three days run from cholita market comedores to Gustu's tasting menu, with api, tucumanas and singani in between.
Open-air produce market climbing Calle Rodríguez in San Pedro, trading roughly 06:00–18:00 daily. Cholitas in bowler hats sell twenty-plus native potato varieties, chuño, tarwi and Andean herbs, with buñuelo fryers at the top corner.
Two-storey market off Max Paredes where the upstairs comedor cooks paceño home food: fricasé, the pork-and-hominy chilli soup eaten as a hangover cure, plus sajta de pollo and plato paceño with choclo and fried cheese.
Renovated municipal market on Avenida Camacho with a tidy upstairs food court. Order sopa de maní, silpancho, or juices blended from tumbo, chirimoya and maracuyá. Downstairs stalls sell Altiplano cheeses and llama charque.
Wood-panelled café at Camacho and Mariscal Santa Cruz, open since 1910 and long the table of choice for politicians and journalists. Cortados, api, and crisp marraqueta rolls with cheese served at marble-topped tables.
Specialty roaster pouring single-origin beans from Caranavi and the Yungas, Bolivia's coffee belt three hours downhill by road. V60, aeropress and flat whites alongside cardamom rolls; opens around 08:00 on weekdays.
Thirty-seat room on Calle Murillo serving one daily four-course menu built on Bolivian produce: quinoa cream, pork with chuño, lucuma dessert. No reservations, the queue forms by 12:15 and the kitchen closes when it sells out.
Plant-based fine dining in a restored colonial house at Colón and Potosí. Five- and seven-course tasting menus reinterpret Andean produce — oca, amaranth, quinoa, coca leaf — with no meat, dairy or imported ingredients.
Claus Meyer's restaurant on Calle 10 in Calacoto, flagship of Bolivian new cuisine, cooks only with ingredients grown or raised inside Bolivia — no olive oil, no lemons. Amazon paiche and Altiplano lamb, paired with singani.
Working market near Calle Isaac Tamayo whose breakfast counters open around 06:30: purple api morado with fried pastel de queso, tucumanas stuffed with beef and olive, and sandwich de chola piled with crackling pork.
Carts ring this colonial plaza from late morning, frying tucumanas to order. You dress them yourself from the row of jars on the counter: llajwa chilli, peanut sauce, pickled onion, mustard and mayonnaise, as much as you want.
Sopocachi's eating and drinking strip, three blocks of terraces, craft-beer taps and Bolivian kitchens between Avenida 20 de Octubre and Sánchez Lima. Order a chuflay — singani with ginger ale and lime — before the evening crowd.
Small Sopocachi bar specialising in Bolivian high-altitude wine from Tarija and the Cinti Valley, vineyards planted above 1,800m. Tannat and Cinti's old-vine Vischoqueña by the glass, with cheese and charcuterie boards.