The island has very fertile soil and a warm climate year round so there's lots of fruit in the local cuisine and fruit growing is a big business around here.
Locals sell fruit to tourists on the beaches and to customers who stop at their roadside stands.
Fruit is one of the leading exports, or goods made in the DR that are shipped to and sold in other countries. While it is too cold to grow fruit in the winter in the Northeast (where we live), the climate here is perfect for cultivating fruits like bananas, pineapple, passion fruit, papaya, mango, and guava berries. Lots of the fruit that you eat in the winter in the USA is grown in places like the Dominican where the climate is warmer.
Lots of restaurant storefronts in the DR are painted with the words "Cocina Típico" which means typical cuisine, or everyday food.
Since the DR is on an island (called Hispanolia), most of its towns are built near the ocean and people rely heavily on the sea for work and sustinence. Many people fish for a living and lots of the local cuisine consists of seafood.
The coral reefs and tropical waters surrounding the Samana Peninsula provide fertile fishing grounds for locals.
They catch and serve all sorts of mollusks, like conches and clams, as well as crustaceans, such as lobsters (langostas) and crabs (cámbaros).
Since many people don't have refrigeration (a way to keep food cold), seafood caught off the coast is often cooked and served as soon as a fisherman returns to shore.
Fishermen use traps to catch lobsters in the deeper waters off the coast of the Samana Peninsula.
While metal traps similar to those used by fishermen in Maine and Massachusetts are also used here, those traps can be expensive and did difficult to obtain.
Some local fishermen make their own lobster traps using wood and leaves from Palm trees.
They tie crab meet and conche meat in the trap to serve as bait. Then they use stones and other weights to sink their traps to the sea floor.
Lobsters can only crawl forwards, so once they call into the trap tunnel door, they can't get out. Fishermen drive out to their traps periodically and pull them up to the surface to check if they've caught any lobsters.
The DR's tropical waters are also home to several types of big saltwater fish that people catch and eat too.
These include: Black Jackfish, Atlantic Sailfish, the Great Baracuda, Red Snapper, and Argentinian Sea Bass (called Mero).