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

The Saturday market at STR Agriculture, a farm in the town of Noord, Aruba, didn’t look like much at first. A few tables were set up on a concrete patio, while a metal awning adorned with tiny Aruban flags deflected the hot Caribbean sun from a modest produce selection—long pumpkins, bananas, and cucumbers grown in STR’s greenhouses. But as I walked between the vendors,
it all came to life.

I met a German man advertising cheesecakes layered with black-cherry jam and a woman from the Canary Islands who sold me a jar of mojo rojo—a spicy, oily red-pepper sauce. A stand labeled “Dr. Green” offered fresh lemonade and poffertjes, small pancake puffs from the Netherlands. Next to this was an unattended cooler filled with chicken-curry roti rolls. 

Such a medley shouldn’t be surprising, given that Aruba is one of the Caribbean’s most ethnically diverse islands. Many there speak multiple tongues: Dutch, since Aruba is a self-governing constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands; English, the lingua franca of the 1.4 million overnight visitors per year and the many more who stop for the day as part of a cruise; Spanish, the language of Aruba’s colonizers before the Dutch and a bridge to nearby Venezuela; and Papiamento, the local Afro-Portuguese creole.

Urvin Croes, one of Aruba’s most prominent chefs and culinary advocates, brings this cultural diversity to his cooking. “My mother has Venezuelan and German ancestry,” he told me. “On my father’s side, my grandma is Chinese and my grandpa is very traditionally Aruban.” 

After studying in Italy, Croes moved, like many young Arubans, to the Netherlands, where he worked at a Michelin-starred restaurant for seven years. “But somehow the island always calls me back,” he said. He moved home and soon opened his own restaurants, which now include Caya, a Latin-Caribbean spot, and Infini, a chef’s-table concept. The eight-course menu includes dishes like crispy Peking quail and beef with Caribbean creole sauce. Around 60 percent of the ingredients used at Infini are local, a significant achievement given Aruba’s dry climate and poor soil. “Aruba has a lot to offer,” Croes said. “We could change the notion that people just come here for the beaches, and make it a culinary destination.”

Throughout my stay, I experienced firsthand just how dense the 70-square-mile island is with restaurants—there are around 540, by Croes’s count. Many of them draw inspiration from elsewhere. In San Nicolas, on Aruba’s southeastern end, Jamaican chef Oneil Williams cooks up jerk chicken and curry goat at O’Niel Caribbean Kitchen. The area, initially developed by Afro-Caribbean immigrants who worked in the oil industry, went through a difficult period after the nearby refinery ceased operations, but it’s now home to several art galleries and hosts the annual Aruba Art Fair.

In the mid-island town of Santa Cruz, I visited Huchada, a bakery in a colorful cunucu, a traditional country house. Empanadas and arepas were displayed next to local 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 type of sausage), and bitterballen (stewed-meat croquettes). Another remnant of the Dutch empire: restaurants like Nusa Harbour that serve rijsttafel, a feast of small plates with its origins in the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia.

The cuisine at other restaurants, though, is uncategorizable as anything but Aruban, which might best be defined as a distinct mix of Indigenous Arawakan, Iberian, and West African influences. “Karni stoba is very traditional Aruban, kind of like a braised Portuguese beef stew,” Croes explained. “And we have a bread called pan bati. It’s like a pancake made from sorghum or funchi, our version of polenta.” The best spots for trying Aruban classics are those where the locals go—where you pay in florins, not dollars. At Pika’s Corner, for example, the menu might include balchi pisca (fish cakes), moochi jampaw (flash-fried grouper steaks), or calco a la parrilla (grilled conch).

My visit coincided with Autentico, an annual festival started in 2024 to celebrate Aruban cuisine. It was a pleasantly balmy evening as I strolled around the restaurant stands and pop-up bars populating a pastel-hued stretch of Oranjestad, the island’s capital city. Locals and tourists mingled in the long line for Azar Open Fire Cuisine, where an aproned team turned out skirt steak and guava-glazed pork belly. (I made a note to visit their permanent location, in the resort area of Palm Beach, on my next trip.) The aloe-vera liqueur from Pepe Margo Distillery was the star of the unofficial cocktail of the event. It was like a cool breeze, and the perfect coda to the night.

My favorite meal of the trip, though, was in a small seaside town called Savaneta. It was also one of the simplest: red snapper with a squeeze of lime at Zeerover, where you pay in cash for cuts of fresh fish and handfuls of shrimp by the pound—everything cooked to order. I waited on the covered pier, looking out at bobbing boats and teasing seagulls, as the staff in 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 cold Balashi, the local pilsner, and several shakes of Aruban papaya hot sauce, I couldn’t have been anywhere else in the world. 

A version of this story first appeared in the December 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Island Bites.”