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Dining Out
With more than ninety restaurants to choose from the Turks and Caicos Islands offers an unusually wide and diverse range of cuisine for a small group of Islands. Although such a wide selection is liberating it also presents the visitor with a challenge. One of the resources on this site to assist the visitor are customer reviews with objective general descriptions about the type of food served for each restaurant, with basic details on the setting and the atmosphere. Most restaurants will also have enhanced listings with their menus, photographs showing the outside of the restaurant, the inside of the restaurant, and photographs of items on the restaurant's menu. This site also publish, in PDF format, a Dining Guide with a dozen or so of the Islands' favourite restaurants, across a range of tastes and budgets, to assist the visitor as trusted friend.
When it comes to food and wine, the Turks and Caicos Islands is a melting pot of cultural flavours and delights. Whatever cuisine excites your palate, we are likely to have some representation of it on the Islands along, of course, with our own unique twists. The creativity of local chefs, the bounty of the surrounding ocean, and the influence of a diverse range of nationalities and cultures among the residents of these Islands provide the foundation for a wide range of culinary flavours that make these Islands an absolute delight for the epicure and a real pleasure for the glutton. Whether your tastes run contemporary, traditional, or exotic, you are likely to find something in the restaurants of the Turks and Caicos Islands that is sure to please your palate. If you want to experience a unique blend of international and local flavours found nowhere else in the world, there are many fine restaurants in the Turks and Caicos Islands that will deliver.
Our restaurants range from those serving international dishes with a local flair in chic surroundings to those serving local dishes in the unpretentious setting of local establishments. If you are looking for local food you also won't be disappointed. Mild, sweet, moderately crunchy, and a TCI institution, the queen conch (strombus gigas or Lobatus gigas) has been a favourite with locals and visitors to these Islands from time immemorial. You can enjoy it in countless ways: conch fritters, conch salad, international twists on conch civiche, cracked conch, conch chowder and steamed conch. If you are less adventuresome other marine products that regularly find themselves on the table are lobster, grouper, snapper, mahi mahi, and bonefish. "Peas 'n' Rice" is a national dish, wonderfully spiced and flavoured. Curried goat or chicken, turtle stew, souse, and barbecue ribs are other local favourites. Fried plantain, potato salad and cole slaw are typical accompaniments to local entrees. For dessert there is guava duff, coconut cream pie, dulce and other sweet delights. While you are here you must sample our famous rum punch, daquiris, pina coladas and other cocktails.
This site provides an exhaustive listing of the Islands more than ninety or so restaurants with maps showing their locations with directions how to get to each from any point on our maps. We also publish a Guide, in pdf format and accessible from this site, that provides a brief introduction to some of the most beloved of the Islands' restaurants for the benefit of the visitor who is new or reasonably new to the Islands. It includes an at-a-glance chart, which lists the restaurants in the Guide along with essential details about those restaurants in a table format for easy comparison, representative menus for some of the restaurants in the guide, general overviews for others, along with the Island's most detailed road map showing the exact location of each restaurant.
With more than ninety restaurants on the Islands, if not overwhelmed, the average visitor will never have the opportunity to sample more than a dozen or so restaurants, and that experience might fall far short of representative or indeed the best of what we have to offer. This site also publishes a Guide that serves as trusted friend. The restaurants in that Guide are your best bets. It is not only a good representative sample of the various cuisines available in the Turks & Caicos Islands, but it is a compendium of local favourites. It spans the spectrum of what we have to offer from fine dining, casual, sushi, tex-mex, to local cuisine. There is something for everyone there, from places where you can dine barefoot, places where you can dine while being entertained under vibrant sunsets directly on the beach, establishments offering tasty, fresh and healthy salads with local ingredients, and elegant but laid back settings in plush gardens. As such all the restaurants in our Guide will not appeal to every visitor, but it would be hard to sample all the restaurants in our Dining Guide and not find a few that you absolutely love. You can of course find details of all the restaurants in the country on this site, but if you are a first time visitor your best bets are those in our Guide, which you should use to plan your stay on Island.
