The Pizzeria at Turtle Inn

Most pizza on the Placencia Peninsula comes off an electric deck or out of a beach-bar kitchen. The Pizzeria at Turtle Inn cooks its in a wood-burning oven, in the middle of a garden, and that difference is the whole reason to walk in.

It sits inside Turtle Inn, the beachfront resort owned by Francis Ford Coppola, roughly 3 km north of Placencia Village. You do not have to be a resort guest to eat here: by traveler accounts, the pizzeria is open to outside diners as well. So if you are staying down in the village and looking for a reason to head up the peninsula, this is one.

A Pizzeria Built Around One Oven

The place is small and it knows it. The pizzeria is sited in the resort's organic garden and built around a wood-burning pizza oven, with intimate high-top and bar seating for roughly 10 to 14 guests. That is not a typo. You are eating at a counter, close to the fire, not at a table for twelve.

The style is Napoli. Thin, wood-fired, the crust doing the work that a good crust does when it comes out of real heat. If you have eaten your way down the peninsula and want to see how the other pizzerias in the Maya Beach stretch and beyond compare, this is the one cooking over wood in a garden.

What to Order

The menu is built around the wood-fired pizzas, made with garden-grown herbs and toppings from the same organic garden the pizzeria sits in. Around that core there is a small selection of calzones and salads. That is the menu. It is short on purpose, and the short list is the point: fewer things, all coming off the same fire, using what is growing a few steps away.

• The wood-fired pizzas are the reason the pizzeria exists. Garden herbs and toppings, Napoli-style, out of the wood oven.
• Calzones for the same dough and fire, folded.
• Salads if you want something from the garden that did not go near the oven.

Rebuilt After the Fire

Turtle Inn's kitchen was damaged by a fire in November 2021. The pizzeria was rebuilt afterward in partnership with Belize-based architect Ana Siekavizza. It is worth knowing because the garden setting and the counter-close layout are the result of that rebuild, not an accident of an old room.

Who It's For

This is a page for the traveler standing on the peninsula road deciding whether it is worth the trip up from the village. If you want a beachfront table for a big group, this is not that. If you want thin, wood-fired pizza eaten at a bar in a garden, on a menu built around one oven, it is exactly that.

The Pizzeria at Turtle Inn is one profile on Bites of Belize, our web-verified directory of where to eat across the country. Browse more of the peninsula and beyond through our towns index.