How are the restaurants in Ambergris Caye?
Kate Corrigan - Caye International Bank
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye are lovely. I love them! They are more expensive than other places, but we have a really lovely array of restaurants here. You can eat at local restaurants. When I am trying to spend only US $5 for my lunch, I eat out at local restaurants where you can buy stew chicken, rice, and beans or pork chop, salad and mashed potato. You can also buy burritos, tacos, tostadas (pictured), and nachos for $5.
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye are lovely. I love them! They are more expensive than other places, but we have a really lovely array of restaurants here. You can eat at local restaurants. When I am trying to spend only US $5 for my lunch, I eat out at local restaurants where you can buy stew chicken, rice, and beans or pork chop, salad and mashed potato. You can also buy burritos, tacos, tostadas (pictured), and nachos for $5.
In England, we consider a nice meal to consist of meat, a lot of carbohydrates and vegetables or salad, whereas here in Belize, they will ask you what you want to eat. If you ask what the choices are, they will tell you that it is meat, rice, potatoes and pasta all in the same plate. For me, from England, that just seems very odd. Normally, we would have potatoes and a salad or potatoes and vegetables, but here, they would happily serve rice, potatoes, and salad all in the same plate, and that would be okay.
We also have beautiful restaurants. My favorite is Blue Water Grill. They serve sushi on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which I love. It is a packed restaurant. They do two or three sittings per night during the high season and I love it there. Their breakfast is delicious and their lunch is slightly different but are very lovely. They are open 365 days a year usually.
There is another nice restaurant here in Ambergris Caye called Mangoes and they bring lots of different selection to their menu every year. They have caramba, which is a beautiful fish.
Everywhere you go here in Ambergris Caye, you will find delicious meals but it is not very inexpensive. You will pay anywhere between $30 and $40 for a nice meal at a nice restaurant. You will not get cheap meals here like you would in places like Mexico where you walk down the streets and you will see all their fish and lobsters outside their restaurants and think, “Oh, that’s lovely!” and where you go in and you come out and you spent only $10. It is not like that here in Ambergris Caye. You will find places that serve nice and inexpensive food but if you go to nice places with live music, you will pay extra. This is a tourist town and everything is imported.
Posted December 24, 2014
David Drummond - Georgetown Trust
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye are fabulous! There are more good places to eat than you can shake a stick at. That is one thing that I do find amazing – the number of good restaurants in Ambergris Caye, both from a tourist cuisine perspective all the way down to the local foods. If you want a local-made tamale, burrito, or taco, you could find people who would make them for you. That is what we call with affection, “street food” here...
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye are fabulous! There are more good places to eat than you can shake a stick at. That is one thing that I do find amazing – the number of good restaurants in Ambergris Caye, both from a tourist cuisine perspective all the way down to the local foods. If you want a local-made tamale, burrito, or taco, you could find people who would make them for you. That is what we call with affection, “street food” here in Ambergris Caye.
We also have nicer restaurants in Ambergris Caye. You won’t find fast food restaurants here. There is not a Wendy’s, a Burger King, or a Subway, but you might have the local equivalent of that. Local lunch meals would be around US $5 to $7.50, and would consist of stew, chicken, rice, and beans with plantains.
I lived in front of a bar that has knocked off the McDonald’s type of burgers. A quarter pounder with cheese and French fries would be about $7.50. Pizzas tend to be more expensive. They will be anywhere from $5 to $27.50 for a pizza with different toppings. There are several pizza places here.
It would cost around US $20 to $40 per person for a high-end meal. Steak would be the most expensive thing that you could buy in restaurants here because it costs more to get them to the island. A nice grouper with some mango sauce or some coconut rice and a salad would probably be around $15 to $20. A lobster tail, some coconut rice, and a vegetable will cost around $20 to $25.
The local food items in Ambergris Caye tend to have rice and stew chicken, or stew beef, pork chops, pork, beans, plantains, or coleslaw. Those meals cost around $7.50 all day long. Barbecue is a big item in Ambergris Caye, typically on Saturdays and Sundays. Barbecue chicken with tortilla and maybe some rice and beans and some coleslaw will cost around $5 to $7.50.
There is a wide variety of food here in Ambergris Caye. One of the Thai restaurants is very close to the office. This restaurant has very private seating, about five or six tables in total. Their meals cost around $15 to $35 but is it absolutely fantastic. It is right within walking distance off my office.
There are also Italian restaurants in Ambergris Caye. Pinocchio’s has some great food. Across the street is the Melt Café, which is one of the favorite places for breakfast. Within walking distance of our office complex is probably four or five of the better places to eat. Those five or six restaurants are just a couple blocks or not even a block away. The Thai restaurant is a block to my left and I can see the Melt out my window. I can also see the hamburger place out my window. Pinocchio’s is across from the Thai restaurant. You can get great chicken wings across he corner to my back and there are two local restaurants that serve rice and beans. Cabin’s Diner, right behind our office, has some nice meals, too.
It is surprising. You will not find a TGI Friday’s, a Chili’s, or a branded restaurant on the island or in the country of Belize as a whole, but there is no shortage of very good restaurants within a very close area here in Ambergris Caye. Then a 4 or 5- minute walk away from my office, you’ll find some of the nicest restaurants in the island of Ambergris Caye, such as Blue Water Grill, Mangoes, Red Ginger, and Estelle’s on the water for breakfast.
You can find lot of places to eat in Ambergris Caye with great variety and very good prices.
(David Drummond and friends at the aforementioned Thai restaurant in Ambergris Caye, Belize, pictured.)
Posted May 11, 2015
Rachel Jensen - Grand Baymen
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye are really nice, with the nicer restaurants having prices here pretty much the same as the prices that you would pay in the States. All the places that I’ve been in Latin America have been a lot cheaper so I wasn’t necessarily expecting that the prices in Ambergris Caye would be the same as in the States. The restaurants here are good quality and they...
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye are really nice, with the nicer restaurants having prices here pretty much the same as the prices that you would pay in the States. All the places that I’ve been in Latin America have been a lot cheaper so I wasn’t necessarily expecting that the prices in Ambergris Caye would be the same as in the States. The restaurants here are good quality and they serve fresh food from Belize. You know that the food didn’t come from China and it hasn’t sat on a boat for two weeks. All the tortillas that the restaurants here in Ambergris Caye use are all freshly made that same day, which is very nice. The restaurants here serve all fresh food
There are cheaper restaurants that serve local food. For US $3, you could get a nice meal with rice and beans, cabbage, and cheese. You could also get a huge breakfast burrito for $2.50.
Just recently I went to a resort at the north part of the island that has their local favorite with local prices. They have this burrito with corn tortilla with cabbage and lime slaw with some fresh tomatoes for only $3. It was a great price and they are absolutely delicious.
If you choose to and if you don’t go to the touristy places, you can eat less expensively than you would in the US.
(Pictured: palapa on Ambergris Caye.)
Posted June 20, 2015
Lisa McCorkle Guerrero - DIAMANTÉ
Not only me personally, but all my friends and tourists who I meet, say “I have never had a bad meal in San Pedro (the main town on Ambergris Caye).” We really do have great restaurants. Our food is a mixture of so many different cultures and is very tasty, and some of it is very spicy. Our food is delicious. We’re spoiled when it comes to that, even when I travel to other places. A lot of people say that the food and restaurants...
Not only me personally, but all my friends and tourists who I meet, say “I have never had a bad meal in San Pedro (the main town on Ambergris Caye).” We really do have great restaurants. Our food is a mixture of so many different cultures and is very tasty, and some of it is very spicy. Our food is delicious. We’re spoiled when it comes to that, even when I travel to other places. A lot of people say that the food and restaurants here are expensive, but I don’t think so. When you go to a nice restaurant here in San Pedro, you will pay anywhere from US $20 to $30, which is an average cost for a really good meal. (Of course, lobster is going to be a lot more expensive.) I’ve traveled to the US and I really don’t see why people say that our food is expensive here because when you go to an average, what I would call a higher end fast food restaurant in the States like Chili’s or something similar, and you’ll pay $12 to $16 for a chicken burger. I think the standards for our food are way above what Chili’s would be. So to me, I don’t think the food is unreasonably expensive.
We have Mexican restaurants. We have a lot of restaurants that have American meals because we cater to a lot of American tourists. So in my mom’s restaurant, Caprice, for example, we have our locally infused dishes but will also have fajitas, burgers, chicken fingers, and other dishes in order to cater to people that might not want something more local or different. You’d be surprised how many tourists travel to other destinations and want to keep within what they’re used to.
(Night dining on the beach at Caprice Bar and Grill, Ambergris Caye, Belize, pictured.)
Posted September 22, 2015
Bob Hamilton - Century 21 Coral Beach Realty
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye could use a little bit more creativity. Specifically some of the bars / restaurants seem to have the same menus. We do have some exceptionally good food in some of the higher end restaurants at the resorts. Victoria House South runs at around US $550 a night and they have a really nice restaurant down there. It is not cheap, but it is definitely of good quality and they have a nice selection.You could go to a restaurant here on Ambergris...
The restaurants in Ambergris Caye could use a little bit more creativity. Specifically some of the bars / restaurants seem to have the same menus. We do have some exceptionally good food in some of the higher end restaurants at the resorts. Victoria House South runs at around US $550 a night and they have a really nice restaurant down there. It is not cheap, but it is definitely of good quality and they have a nice selection.You could go to a restaurant here on Ambergris Caye and get a really decent dinner for $35 to $40 BZ (US $17.50 to $20). That is a little bit less than you would pay in Canada, but you have better things to pay for in Canada, for example, salmon. Down here in Ambergris Caye, the only place you can get salmon is at The Green House, and it’s $38 a pound. That’s expensive, so none of the restaurants serve that. If you go to the less fancy restaurants, the food is really good and they sell meals from $12 to $20 BZ or US $6 to $10, which would be for a good and decent meal. It could be a snapper, or other fish similar to that. Lobsters are more expensive.
There are also restaurants that you can go to here in Ambergris Caye that serve local food. There is a place where I used to go to every morning on the way to work. They serve pork tacos in little corn tortillas. They also have stewed pork with spices in it. You get two pork tacos for $1 BZ, or 50 cents US. If you want chicken, you can get three chicken tacos for $1 BZ. For $2 or $3 you can get enough food to fill you for breakfast. They also make all fresh juices such as papaya and watermelon. They also make banana juice here with milk. These are all fresh squeezed juices. My usual at that restaurant is four tacos for $2 BZ (US $1) and I get a liter of fresh watermelon juice for $3.50 BZ (US $1.75). So for $5.50 BZ (US $2.25), I have my juice and my breakfast and I have juice left over for lunch.
There are Chinese people who run some of these restaurants and here. You can go to one of the Chinese restaurants and you can get really good fried chicken here with French fries for $8 BZ (US $4). There are some stir-fries in the Chinese restaurants here but you are not going get a good Sichuan shrimp dish. In Belize City, they have Chinese restaurants like that. Most of the people down here in Ambergris Caye do not spend a lot of money on food, but the gringos tourists do. So a lot of the places where we eat, the locals go to and eat good food. You can get a really good cheeseburger and French fries for US $5. The burger is made of real meat and not artificial stuff that you might get in the States.
(Meal at Palmilla restaurant in the Victoria House South, Ambergris Caye, Belize, pictured.)
Posted October 7, 2015