Mare Restaurant at Turtle Inn

Mare is the restaurant at Turtle Inn, and it does something most kitchens on the Placencia Peninsula do not: it runs a wood-burning oven for pizzas made to order and finishes whole fish in a crust of sea salt. It is the flagship dining room of Turtle Inn, a beachfront resort in Francis Ford Coppola's Coppola Family Hideaways collection, which is another way of saying the food here is taken seriously.

The kitchen's idea is fresh seafood married to traditional Italian cooking. That combination is the reason to walk in rather than settle for the nearest palapa. You can order a ceviche or a bowl of gazpacho to start, watch a pizza go into the wood fire, and end with fish baked inside a sea-salt crust that gets cracked open at the table. Those three dishes come up again and again when people describe eating here.

What to Order at Mare

Start with the ceviche or the gazpacho. Both are built for the heat of the peninsula and both show up consistently on the list of what Mare is known for. If you want to see the kitchen's Italian side, the pizzas are cooked to order in the wood-burning oven, so they carry the char and smoke you only get from live fire.

The dish worth planning around is the fish cooked in a sea-salt crust. Sealing a whole fish in salt is a slow, deliberate way to cook it, and it is not something you find at every counter down the beach. If ceviche is your thing, it is a cuisine the peninsula does well, and Mare's version sits alongside the rest of the region's seafood and ceviche spots worth seeking out.

The Rijsttafel Nights

On Monday and Thursday evenings, Mare serves a traditional Dutch Indonesian-style rijsttafel dinner. A rijsttafel is a spread of many small dishes served around rice, and it is an unusual thing to find in Belize. If that is what you came for, the day of the week matters: it runs Mondays and Thursdays, not every night.

Where It Is, and Getting There

Turtle Inn sits on the Placencia Peninsula in the Stann Creek District, between the village of Seine Bight and Placencia Village. It is within biking distance or a short taxi ride of Placencia Village, so you do not need to be staying at the resort to eat here.

Non-guests are welcome at Mare with a reservation. If you are coming from the village and would rather not drive, the resort can arrange a minibus pickup for outside diners. Book ahead either way, and sort out the ride when you do. The peninsula is long and narrow, and the beach towns north toward Maya Beach string along the same road, so it helps to know your plan before you set out.

Who Mare Is For

Mare suits the traveler who wants one proper sit-down dinner on the peninsula: fresh seafood, a wood-fired pizza, a bottle of something, a table near the water. It is a resort restaurant with a real kitchen behind it, not a walk-up counter. If you are staying at Turtle Inn there is also Auntie Luba's Kitchen at Turtle Inn on the property, but Mare is the one built around the seafood and the Italian oven. Make the reservation, and if the day lines up, come on a rijsttafel night.