La Fortuna Restaurants: Where to Eat Near Arenal Volcano
Eating around Arenal splits into three categories: restaurants with a volcano view, local sodas where Costa Ricans actually eat, and the tourist strip in La Fortuna town. They are good for different things, and the view is not always where the best food is.
Restaurants with an Arenal Volcano view
The views are not in town. La Fortuna itself sits low and mostly looks at the volcano from below, often through cloud. The panoramic views come from the western side, up around El Castillo, where the road climbs above Lake Arenal and you can see the cone and the water at the same time.
Fusion Arenal Mirador
The best-known of them, and the closest good restaurant to us — a few minutes west of The Majestic Lodge in El Castillo, roughly 6km southwest of Arenal Volcano National Park.
It is family-run: brothers, sons and cousins, all Costa Rican, with a couple of decades of restaurant work behind them. You eat on a terrace surrounded by garden with the volcano on one side and Lake Arenal below — from your table, not from a viewpoint you walk to afterwards. The cooking is Costa Rican with international influence, and the seafood has a good reputation.
Go at sunset if the sky is behaving. Reserve if there are more than a few of you — they are on fusionarenal.com.
Sodas: where the food value actually is
A soda is a small family-run Costa Rican restaurant. The standard order is a casado — rice, black beans, salad, fried plantain and a protein, usually chicken, fish or beef, on one plate. It is the everyday lunch of the country, it costs a fraction of what the tourist restaurants charge, and at a good soda it is better food.
There are sodas all through La Fortuna and along the roads around it. The general rule holds everywhere in Costa Rica: the ones full of Costa Ricans at 12:30 on a weekday are the ones to eat at.
La Fortuna town
The centre of town has the highest concentration of restaurants — pizza, steak, sushi, international menus, a few good coffee places. It is convenient and it is where you end up after a day at the waterfall. It is also the most expensive food in the area and the most oriented toward visitors. Fine for a night out, not where you will eat best.
Eating here with a large group
This is the part most restaurant guides skip. Kitchens around Arenal are mostly small and family-run. A table of four walks in anywhere. A table of eighteen does not.
- Always call ahead for groups of eight or more, ideally the day before.
- Expect one seating. Small kitchens send food when it is ready, not in courses across a long table.
- Dinner runs early. Many places close by 9pm or 10pm.
- Ask about cash. Card is widely taken now, but sodas are often cash only, and colones usually beat paying in dollars.
Eating at the lodge instead
Feeding a large group out every night gets expensive and logistically tiring. At The Majestic Lodge, breakfast is included with your booking, and we offer lunch and dinner meal packages cooked on site, so most groups eat in for several nights and go out for the ones that matter — the sunset at Fusion, a night in town.
We can also book the restaurants and arrange the driving, which for eighteen people is the difference between one phone call and a lot of them.