Food Made with Passion

We love eating unpretentious, flavoursome food made with passion and the highest quality seasonal ingredients. So that is also how we love to cook it at our lodge.

Our menus are set but change daily depending on the foods that are in season in our gardens and in our neighbour’s gardens, the fish the old fishermen along our beach have caught and the ingredients we have available in our remote, off-grid location. We do not serve any red meat in keeping with our conservation ethos. All our meals are special and inspired by the classic traditions of our Italian families and made possible by local knowledge of what grows in the rainforest. And, of course, we will always strive to make all our guests feel at home by ensuring our vegetarian and vegan visitors can also enjoy our cuisine.

Every amazing day with us starts with delicious breads straight from the oven and comes to an end with an aperitivo followed by a four-course candlelit dinner. Fine dining doesn’t get much simpler.

SOME OF OUR MENUES

**SUSTAINABLE LINE-CAUGHT FISH**

We are blessed with waters at our doorsteps brimming with marine life, and we make sure that all our fishing is very low-scale and has minimal impact on our surrounding environment. Small barracudas, or picudas as the locals call them, bonitos, jacks, tunas, red snappers and mackerels are what we fish the most, either from a kayak or from the shores of our own beach, using a simple string wound up around a wooden reel. We choose not to buy fish from fish mongers as we find the amount of by-catch associated with commercial fishing practices unacceptable. Similarly, we avoid shrimps whose production is strongly linked to the destruction of both mangrove habitats and ocean beds in Costa Rica and around the world. We cook all the fish we serve with gratitude and simplicity, to preserve its freshness and authentic flavour.

**ORGANIC FRUIT AND VEGETABLES**

Our tropical garden gifts us with a large variety of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables. Pineapples, papayas and many types of bananas grow easily in our hot and humid climate. All we do is plant new shoots and mother nature takes care of the rest. Picking those fruits at the right time is crucial though, as ripe fruits will quickly be devoured by squirrel monkeys, coatis, opossums and birds. Most fruits, including water apples, star fruit, cás and arazá, grow so abundantly, we can all feast on them - our local wildlife and us. We source vegetables that need cooler night temperatures from Roy, a local farmer in San Vito, a small village located at the foothills of the Talamanca Mountain Range.

IMG_5390 2.jpg — **OUR FRESH EGG PASTA**

Homemade, fresh egg pasta (*pasta all'uovo fatta in casa*) was the cornerstone of cooking in our grandmothers' kitchens back in Rome and Florence. That's where we learnt, even before we could read a recipe, to turn simple ingredients into mounds of golden fettuccine and tagliatelle. Just like we would in Italy, here in the Costa Rican rainforest, we use only three basic ingredients to make our pasta from scratch: fresh eggs laid by our chickens, Costa Rican flour and our own spring mountain water. All are the hallmark of simplicity, yet so vital in making a meal truly memorable.

**OUR BREADS AND AFTERNOON CAKES**

Il *pane casereccio,* a traditional crusty loaf with a chewy inside, is another Italian staple we couldn’t be without, not even in the rainforest. We prepare our daily leavened traditional bread using our *lievito madre* (a sourdough starter which has been in our family for a few years and our kids have even named!) and, just as with our fresh egg pasta, nothing more than our spring water and local flour. Our morning rolls, topped with nutritious seeds, are also prepared daily and served warm at breakfast. We combine both our Italian and British roots at five o’clock every day, when we serve a pot of organic English tea (our tea bags are all plastic-free) in our fine bone china cups accompanied by a freshly-made cake or biscotti.

PDO parmigiano reggiano in the rainforest — **THE SMALL TOUCHES**

At Golfo Dulce Retreat, it’s all about the small touches. From local organic vanilla pods and cacao for our gelato and cakes, to organic peppercorn and turmeric to flavour our dishes, we make sure to source only the best ingredients that are available in this remote area. We even make sure we only use natural sea salt with no additives. In addition, our cuisine wouldn’t be truly authentic without some unmissable Italian touches: the cold-pressed, organic, extra virgin olive oil we use in most of our cooking, the Modena PDO Balsamic vinegar we splash on our fresh salads, not to mention the PDO Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano that enhance our evening soups and pasta dishes. Oh….did we forget to say we also make the delicious jams and natural yogurt we serve at breakfast?

fresheggs — **OUR EGGS**

Fresh, nutritious eggs are a vital ingredient in our delicious ice creams, scrumptious cakes and many other delightful foods we prepare for our guests. All our eggs come straight from our rainforest chickens, which forage in our tropical gardens all day long. We supplement their natural diet only with corn, and this in turn attracts great curassows and their chicks, which you will often see following our chicken flock closely, as well as squirrel monkeys above in the tree canopy! Because our chickens are truly free range and we feed them a simple and natural diet, we don’t always collect all the eggs we need, so we also source eggs from an old farm just a few beaches away.

**OUR GELATO & SORBETTO**

There’s no better way to end one of our four-course delicious dinners than to tuck into a real, Italian gelato freshly made in the rainforest. As with all the food we make, we like to keep it simple, so our gelato is made with nothing more than fresh milk, Costa Rican cane sugar and egg yolks straight from our chicken coop. We love making *il gelato all crema e il gelato al cioccolato*, the cornerstones of any Italian gelateria, while our roasted pineapple, banana and passionfruit gelati all use local ingredients that perfectly match our tropical surroundings. Our fruit sorbets, made just a few hours before serving, are also delicious and very refreshing.

**MICRO ROASTED ARTISAN COFFEE**

We source our artisanal coffee beans from a micro-roaster located on the Playa Jaco. Their beans come straight from Tarrazú, Costa Rica’s world famous high-altitude coffee region, and because they are roasted in small batches, the beans are always fresh. Here at the Retreat we stock Bohio’s Ritual, a medium roast, balanced coffee with dry fruits, floral notes and subtle hints of dark chocolate which we think is best enjoyed with our Chemex pour-over coffee maker. We are also big fans of Bohio’s Ubaldo, a stronger dark roast with distinct chocolate notes and low acidity which we use with our Simonelli espresso machine or our simpler Moka pots, a must-have in any Italian household. And in order to brew the best cup, we always grind our coffee beans at the last minute.

**WINES, CRAFT BEERS, KOMBUCHA AND MORE…**

We want our guests to fully enjoy our meals and as such we make sure our wine fridges are always stocked up with a good variety of white and red wines as well as Prosecco and french Champagne. We are also fans of Costa Ricas’s vibrant craft beer movement and we do offer a good selection here at the Retreat ranging from refreshing craft lagers, to bolder IPAs and a few eclectic fruity options. Our cocktails are made with the best rums and tequilas from the region and we are also partial to a soothing *amaro* after dinner... For a non-alcoholic option we also stock kombucha as well as a few soft drinks.