Auntie Luba's Kitchen at Turtle Inn

Auntie Luba's Kitchen is the open-air dining room at Turtle Inn, and it cooks Belizean food: curry chicken, coconut shrimp, conch fritters, beef stew, and a key lime pie baked in the resort's own kitchen. It sits north of Placencia Village, on the Placencia peninsula in the Stann Creek District, and it is the casual, walk-up-relaxed side of the resort's dining rather than the dressed-up one.

What Auntie Luba's Kitchen Actually Is

This is one of the dining venues at Turtle Inn, a resort on the peninsula associated with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola. Of the resort's tables, Auntie Luba's is the open-air, casual one. The menu is Belizean and local Placencia-style cooking, which on a peninsula that has fished for a living for generations means seafood and Creole home dishes rather than a menu chasing trends.

If you are staying elsewhere on the peninsula and working your way through its tables, this is a resort restaurant that keeps the cooking close to what the villages down the road eat.

What to Order

A handful of dishes come up again and again from the resort and from reviewers, and they map neatly onto Belizean home cooking:

• Curry chicken. Belize's curry is its own thing, a Creole-and-East-Indian braise of chicken cooked down soft, usually landing next to rice and beans. It is the dish you order when you want to taste how the country actually eats on a weeknight.
• Coconut shrimp. Shrimp and coconut are both peninsula staples, and this is the version that leans sweet and crisp.
• Conch fritters. Conch chopped fine and fried into fritters is a Placencia standby, the kind of thing that comes off the water and onto a plate without much ceremony.
• Beef stew. Brown-stewed beef is Belizean comfort food, slow and savory, another plate that tells you the kitchen is cooking home food, not hotel food.
• Key lime pie. Baked in-house rather than trucked in. If you only remember one thing off this page, make it this.

Between the coconut shrimp and the conch fritters, this is very much a seafood-leaning table. If that is what you are chasing up and down the peninsula, it sits alongside the peninsula's other seafood and ceviche spots.

The Open-Air Room

The seating is open-air, which on this peninsula is less a design choice than the default: you eat with the outside air moving through the room. That is the texture of the place. It is a sit-down restaurant on resort grounds, casual in feel, and the setting does the work that a closed, air-conditioned dining room would try to do somewhere colder.

If you would rather have sand underfoot and a drink in hand, that is a different kind of evening on the peninsula; the beach bars are the page for that. Auntie Luba's is the plated, open-air option inside a resort.

Who It's For

Come here if you want Belizean food, the curry chicken and coconut shrimp and conch fritters and that slice of key lime pie, eaten in open air on resort grounds a short way north of Placencia Village. It is casual, it is Belizean and Placencia-style on the plate, and it is a fair stop whether you are staying at Turtle Inn or eating your way along the peninsula.

If you are mapping out where to eat up and down the coast, start from the towns index and work north from the village.