Where should I eat in Bocas del Toro, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Bocas del Toro's kitchen is not Panama City's. The archipelago was settled largely by Afro-Caribbean families from Jamaica and Barbados who came for the banana trade, and the food of Isla Colón and Bastimentos is Caribbean cooking in coconut milk, not the corn-and-sancocho cooking of Pacific Panama. The dish to build a meal around is rondón — the name is "run down" in the local Guari-guari creole — a coconut-milk stew of whatever the boats brought in (fish, conch, shrimp, sometimes turtle in older times) simmered with yam, plantain, yuca and dasheen and a whole habanero floated on top for perfume. You find the honest version not in the backpacker strip but in family fondas in Bocas Town's side streets and in Old Bank on Bastimentos, where it is cooked to order and takes its time.

The supporting cast is consistent everywhere: rice and beans cooked in coconut milk (a different, richer dish from the Pacific side's plain rice and beans), patí — a flaky turnover of seasoned ground beef with chile, descended from the Jamaican patty — sold from bakery windows for a dollar-scale snack, pan bon, the dark, spiced fruit bread baked for weekends and Easter, and plantain tarts. Overwater restaurants on the circuit stops serve the day's catch grilled with coconut rice; the best-known independent tables in Bocas Town are El Último Refugio, a small waterfront dining room whose menu is rewritten around the market, and Bibi's on the Beach, over the water on Isla Carenero, a five-minute water taxi from town, for seafood with the classic island view.

Finish with what the mainland behind the islands grows. The hills around Almirante are cacao country worked by Ngäbe farmers, and Bocas produces small-batch chocolate — bars and drinking chocolate sold under names like Oreba, made from beans grown in those communities. Order a hot chocolate or buy bars as your souvenir; pair breakfast with coconut water straight from the nut and, in the evening, a rum punch made with Panamanian rum at a dockside bar while the water taxis settle.

Two published rules shape the bill and the boat day. Panama's sales tax, the ITBMS, runs at 7 percent on prepared food — the general rate in force since 1 July 2010 — but at 10 percent on alcoholic beverages and 10 percent again on lodging, so the rum and the room are taxed harder than the fish, while fondas and fast-food counters are not meant to charge it at all. And the archipelago's finest picnic spot comes with its own code: the Ministry of Environment's posted rules for Cayo Zapatilla 2, inside Isla Bastimentos National Marine Park, prohibit alcohol and loud music on the cay, require visitors to land by the pier, and oblige every group to carry its waste back off the island rather than leave it or drop it at sea.

An overwater deck off Isla Carenero at dusk: a whole fried snapper with coconut rice and patacones, a bottle of hot sauce from the owner's own peppers, and below the railings the lagoon going dark green as the lights of Bocas Town come on across the channel.

The pepper in rondón is traditionally left whole and unbroken on purpose: it perfumes the stew as it simmers, and the cook's skill is judged by whether the pod survives to the table intact — burst it, and the dish turns punishingly hot. Eating around the whole chile is not pickiness; it is how the dish was designed.

• Snack like a resident — Start the day with a patí and coffee from a Bocas Town bakery window
• Rondón at lunch — Order it at a family fonda in town or in Old Bank, and allow time: it is cooked when you ask
• One dinner over the water — El Último Refugio in town, or the short water taxi to Bibi's on Carenero, for the day's catch

The best Afro-Caribbean cooking sits off the main strip and often runs on informal hours — fondas close when the food runs out, and rondón may need ordering ahead on quiet days. Bocas Town also has a large international layer of pizza, sushi and burger places aimed at travelers, which is fine eating but not the islands' food. Seafood follows the sea: in rough weather the catch shrinks and lobster and conch prices rise.

Have rondón once in a fonda and once at an overwater table, and pick up Ngäbe-grown Bocas chocolate before you leave the archipelago.