With over half a million inhabitants, Asunción is the capital city of Paraguay and concentrates the highest population density and the political and economic power. Like most large cities on the American continent, street vending of products in general and particularly ready-to-eat foods is common. Lawyers, office workers, and workers in general from downtown Asunción take their lunch break and can find hundreds of street stalls with people offering an immense variety of options to taste at affordable prices.
In addition to the usual hot dogs— or hot dogs—hamburgers and sandwiches of various kinds, it is very traditional to find street sales of the most characteristic dishes of the local cuisine. Authentic Paraguayan foods and drinks are distributed in well-placed stalls on the sidewalks, where sometimes even tables and chairs are offered for greater comfort for diners.
Among the street food offerings in Asunción, more than 70 varieties of chipa can be highlighted. Chipa starch, chipa piru, chipa cuerito, chipa guazú, chipa so’o—filled with meat—and chipa manduyí—with peanut—are some of the delights freshly baked in these places. Other typical foods like mbeju, pastel mandi’o, payaguá mascada, and Paraguayan soup are also common in street food stalls. Sausages, choripán, or authentic butifarras, which consist of a very seasoned chopped pork sausage, are also very common.
One of the most striking curiosities of the foods sold in shops or directly on the streets of Asunción, which tends to catch the attention of foreigners or first-time visitors, are empanada sandwiches. This means that, in addition to selling the classic empanadas known throughout much of the continent, in Asunción they are served with a piece of bread, cut in half, with the empanada placed in the middle to form a sandwich, often accompanied by some spicy sauce.
Among the most present desserts and sweets are fruit salads—with whipped cream or dulce de leche—homemade sweets made of sweet potato or guava, bars of peanuts with honey, milk, or sweet potato with chocolate, and the unmissable churros—plain or filled with dulce de leche.
But to digest such a variety of food, it’s necessary to drink something. Besides coffee, water, or sodas, like in other countries, there are two distinctly Paraguayan drinks: cocido quemado and tereré. Cocido quemado—even called black cocido—is basically a hot beverage very similar to mate cocido but with the only difference that sugar is placed directly on the charcoal embers. Once caramelized, yerba is added, followed by boiling water to make the infusion, then filtered, cooled, and drunk—usually at breakfast or snack time. Tereré, on the other hand, is a typical Guarani infusion, which is drunk with cold water mixed with medicinal herbs and placed in a container called guampa, to be sipped through a bombilla. In the squares of Asunción, there are stalls selling all kinds of medicinal herbs for preparing tereré to suit the consumer’s taste, and they rent out complete sets: guampa with yerba mate, bombilla, and a thermos with cold water and selected herbs.
A place where you can find all these Paraguayan specialties together is the public markets, which are distributed across various parts of the city. The Municipal Market 4 is recognized as the most comprehensive and busiest.
