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I am looking at some menu photos from Costa Rica and I noted that they list two prices, and the second has i.i. next to it. What does this mean? Here is an example(taken from here):

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Googling did not help. My speculation is that first price is before taxes, the latter is with taxes or alternatively that one is bigger portion.

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Most likely it stands for impuestos incluidos, or "taxes included". The increase from the base amount to the "i.i." amount is 23%, which includes both the IVA (a value-added tax) and a gratuity for the server:

A notable question came from a reader named Stacy who told us about the time she dined at a nice restaurant in Quepos and she asked the waiter to bring the check:

“OMG, what is this 23% Costa Rica tourist tax?”

That 23 percent you saw on the receipt from the restaurant does not entirely represent taxes. Only 13 percent of the meal price was assessed on value-added taxes (Impuesto al Valor Agregado, or IVA in Spanish). The remaining 10 percent was allocated to the waiter’s tip. It looks like the restaurant did everything correctly, particularly if it itemized and indicated the IVA tax and tip separately on the bill.

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  • That's correct - and note (@Ivaylo) that your other option of a bigger portion wouldn't make sense when the main part of the dish is specified by weight as with the steaks - also note the use of units to suit Americans rather than metric.
    – Chris H - UK
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 9:44
  • @ChrisH-UK, good point yes I did not notice this. And yes I see the unit. That is to be expected as many of the tourists they get are from the US
    – Ivaylo Strandjev
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 10:37
  • @IvayloStrandjev Coming from Europe it's quite obvious how much the Costa Rican tourism industry is influence by the US market. I would say about half the people we met there about 10 years ago were American, with plenty of Canadians, British people (we'd notice those) and native Spanish speakers in approximately that order, fewer other Europeans though I certainly overheard German and had a conversation with a French couple at Arenal.
    – Chris H - UK
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 10:41
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    @ChrisH-UK Yeah, it's still about 42% Americans, which was about 3 times as much as the #2 origin of next-door Nicaragua (as of 2018, that is... not sure how the pandemic and unrest in Nicaragua has affected those numbers, but I wouldn't be surprised if the American percentage is quite a bit higher now due to those factors.) I would also assume that the American, Canadian, and European visitors account for quite a bit higher percentage of revenues than their visitor shares suggest, though.
    – reirab
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 20:42
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    @reirab revenues, and also guests in the hotels we were staying in (fairly upmarket wildlife-focussed places). Also those figures are a few years more recent than my experience. I can tell Latin American Spanish from Spanish Spanish, most of the time, but not tell the difference between countries in the Americas (but then I speak very little Spanish) so I wouldn't have been able to tell the Latin American visitors apart from locals
    – Chris H - UK
    Commented Jan 18, 2022 at 21:08

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