I Ate My Way Through Aruba—and Discovered a Culinary Revolution

The Saturday market at STR Agriculture, a farm within the city of Noord, Aruba, didn’t appear to be a lot at first. Just a few tables had been arrange on a concrete patio, whereas a metallic awning adorned with tiny Aruban flags deflected the recent Caribbean solar from a modest produce choice—lengthy pumpkins, bananas, and cucumbers grown in STR’s greenhouses. However as I walked between the distributors,all of it got here to life.

I met a German man promoting cheesecakes layered with black-cherry jam and a girl from the Canary Islands who offered me a jar of mojo rojo—a spicy, oily red-pepper sauce. A stand labeled “Dr. Inexperienced” supplied recent lemonade and poffertjes, small pancake puffs from the Netherlands. Subsequent to this was an unattended cooler stuffed with chicken-curry roti rolls. 

Such a medley shouldn’t be stunning, on condition that Aruba is among the Caribbean’s most ethnically numerous islands. Many there communicate a number of tongues: Dutch, since Aruba is a self-governing constituent nation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; English, the lingua franca of the 1.4 million in a single day guests per yr and the numerous extra who cease for the day as a part of a cruise; Spanish, the language of Aruba’s colonizers earlier than the Dutch and a bridge to close by Venezuela; and Papiamento, the native Afro-Portuguese creole.

Urvin Croes, certainly one of Aruba’s most outstanding cooks and culinary advocates, brings this cultural variety to his cooking. “My mom has Venezuelan and German ancestry,” he advised me. “On my father’s aspect, my grandma is Chinese language and my grandpa is very historically Aruban.” 

After finding out in Italy, Croes moved, like many younger Arubans, to the Netherlands, the place he labored at a Michelin-starred restaurant for seven years. “However one way or the other the island all the time calls me again,” he stated. He moved house and shortly opened his personal eating places, which now embrace Caya, a Latin-Caribbean spot, and Infini, a chef’s-table idea. The eight-course menu contains dishes like crispy Peking quail and beef with Caribbean creole sauce. Round 60 p.c of the components used at Infini are native, a big achievement given Aruba’s dry local weather and poor soil. “Aruba has quite a bit to supply,” Croes stated. “We might change the notion that folks simply come right here for the seashores, and make it a culinary vacation spot.”

All through my keep, I skilled firsthand simply how dense the 70-square-mile island is with eating places—there are round 540, by Croes’s rely. Lots of them draw inspiration from elsewhere. In San Nicolas, on Aruba’s southeastern finish, Jamaican chef Oneil Williams cooks up jerk hen and curry goat at O’Niel Caribbean Kitchen. The realm, initially developed by Afro-Caribbean immigrants who labored within the oil trade, went via a tough interval after the close by refinery ceased operations, nevertheless it’s now house to a number of artwork galleries and hosts the annual Aruba Artwork Honest.

Within the mid-island city of Santa Cruz, I visited Huchada, a bakery in a colourful cunucu, a standard nation home. Empanadas and arepas had been displayed subsequent to native bites like spicy fritters made with black-eyed peas and pastechis, the deep-fried turnovers that make for a quintessentially Aruban breakfast. Elsewhere, Café 080 serves Dutch fried treats like kaassoufflé (cheese-filled pastry), frikandel (a kind of sausage), and bitterballen (stewed-meat croquettes). One other remnant of the Dutch empire: eating places like Nusa Harbour that serve rijsttafel, a feast of small plates with its origins within the Dutch colonial interval in Indonesia.

The delicacies at different eating places, although, is uncategorizable as something however Aruban, which would possibly finest be outlined as a definite mixture of Indigenous Arawakan, Iberian, and West African influences. “Karni stoba could be very conventional Aruban, sort of like a braised Portuguese beef stew,” Croes defined. “And we’ve a bread known as pan bati. It’s like a pancake produced from sorghum or funchi, our model of polenta.” The very best spots for attempting Aruban classics are these the place the locals go—the place you pay in florins, not {dollars}. At Pika’s Nook, for instance, the menu would possibly embrace balchi pisca (fish truffles), moochi jampaw (flash-fried grouper steaks), or calco a la parrilla (grilled conch).

My go to coincided with Autentico, an annual competition began in 2024 to have a good time Aruban delicacies. It was a pleasantly balmy night as I strolled across the restaurant stands and pop-up bars populating a pastel-hued stretch of Oranjestad, the island’s capital metropolis. Locals and vacationers mingled within the lengthy line for Azar Open Fireplace Delicacies, the place an aproned group turned out skirt steak and guava-glazed pork stomach. (I made a word to go to their everlasting location, within the resort space of Palm Seaside, on my subsequent journey.) The aloe-vera liqueur from Pepe Margo Distillery was the star of the unofficial cocktail of the occasion. It was like a cool breeze, and the right coda to the evening.

My favourite meal of the journey, although, was in a small seaside city known as Savaneta. It was additionally one of many easiest: pink snapper with a squeeze of lime at Zeerover, the place you pay in money for cuts of recent fish and handfuls of shrimp by the pound—the whole lot cooked to order. I waited on the coated pier, searching at bobbing boats and teasing seagulls, because the employees within the open fry kitchen seasoned the seafood, flashed it in oil, piled fries and plantains into plastic baskets, and scooped pickled onions and their signature tart, creamy white sauce onto the plate. Digging in with a chilly Balashi, the native pilsner, and a number of other shakes of Aruban papaya scorching sauce, I couldn’t have been anyplace else on this planet. 

A model of this story first appeared within the December 2025 challenge of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “Island Bites.”