Montezuma Just Lost Its Most Decorated Kitchen. Here's What Took Its Place.

Walk into Hotel nYa's dining room this month looking for Ubin, and you won't find it. The name on the menu board now reads Agrá, and the kitchen that once ran on 84 dishes of French and Italian technique has been replaced by something built around wild greens, foraged herbs, and whatever the local fishers brought in that morning.

For anyone who's eaten at Ubin over the past several years, this is the kind of change that gets discussed over coffee at Sano Banano before it makes it onto anyone's radar screen.

Who Was Running That Kitchen, and Why It Mattered

Keilor Sánchez didn't build Ubin as a side project. He's a Montezuma native who left home, trained for two decades in professional kitchens, and came back to open his first solo restaurant exactly where he'd grown up. He built a menu of more than 80 dishes blending French and Italian technique with local product, and the restaurant carried membership in La Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, an international mark of culinary distinction that few kitchens on this coast have held. For a town this size, that was a genuine anchor: a place where the cooking was composed and deliberate, not just fresh and pleasant.

That kitchen is now Chef Álvaro Rodríguez's. He's spent more than a decade cooking, teaching, and consulting across Costa Rican hospitality, with stints at properties including Belmar, Kura, and El Remanso, and he trained as both a chef and a nutritionist in Costa Rica and Spain. He calls his approach at Agrá "wild gastronomy," built on relationships with local farmers and fishers rather than the classical technique Sánchez was known for.

This is not a menu refresh. It's a full swap in philosophy. Sánchez ran a restaurant built on training and precision. Rodríguez is running one built on foraging and season. If you loved Ubin for its polish, Agrá is going to feel like a different restaurant wearing the same address, because it is.

There's a detail here that most visitors will never notice but residents should: Agrá offers a 20 percent discount to verified residents of the Cóbano district who can show at least six months of local residency. That's not a promotion aimed at hotel guests. It's a quiet acknowledgment that a restaurant at this level still wants the neighborhood eating there, not just tourists passing through on a slow-travel itinerary.

What Never Moved

Here's the part of the story that actually explains something about how this town works. While the showcase kitchen at nYa changed hands and changed identity, the places Montezuma actually runs on day to day haven't shifted at all.

Up the hill past the waterfall, at the Mariposario butterfly gardens, Butterfly Brewing Co. is still pouring the same beers it's poured for over a decade. Ryan Bickle opened the gardens as a bed and breakfast back in 2005, started brewing on site in 2012, and in 2015 partnered with Bryan and Phoebe Swett to open Cocina Clandestina, the Hispanic-fusion kitchen that shares the space. Check-in data from beer trackers shows the same core lineup, including the Cocina Clandestina pale ale and the Choco Java Stout, still being poured into 2026. If you've done the morning hike to the falls and stopped there for lunch afterward, that habit hasn't needed updating in years.

The garden itself keeps consistent hours: Tuesday through Sunday, 9am to 4:30pm, with the butterflies most active in that first window between 9 and 11:30. All profits from garden admission go back into community projects on the peninsula, which is worth knowing if you're deciding where a Saturday morning donation makes the most local impact.

Down in town, the same holds. El Sano Banano has been family-run since 1989, longer than almost any other business in Montezuma, and its beachfront tables are still where a lot of locals land for breakfast. Cocolores, run by Florencia and Massimiliano, is still the beachfront spot people pick for a slower dinner. And Playa de los Artistas, tucked in across from the Los Mangos hotel with barely a sign to mark it, is still changing its menu daily and still serving some of the most talked-about fish on this stretch of coast.

None of these places needed a new chef or a new concept to stay relevant. They just kept doing the thing they've always done, and the town kept showing up.

The Places Worth the Short Drive

If you're willing to go seven to ten minutes uphill into Las Delicias, Tierra y Fuego is the other constant worth knowing about. An Italian couple runs it out of the jungle, serving wood-fired pizza and handmade pasta at a price point that stays reasonable given the imported ingredients involved. It's not downtown, which is exactly why it's stayed a locals' pick rather than a stop on someone's day-trip itinerary.

And if you've hiked the falls more than once, you've probably crossed paths with the man locals call Crazy Carlos, who's been guiding people up that trail for over twenty years. He's not attached to a restaurant, but he's as much a fixture of the after-hike routine as Clandestina's lunch menu, the kind of local knowledge that doesn't show up on a map but shapes how people actually spend their mornings here.

What This Actually Tells You

The interesting thing about Montezuma's food scene isn't that it changed. It's where the change happened and where it didn't. The one restaurant built around a chef's individual reputation and a fine-dining concept turned over completely, philosophy and all, the moment its founder's original project ran its course. Meanwhile the businesses built around a routine, the brewery you hit after the hike, the soda that's fed three generations of the same family's customers, the beachfront table with no sign, kept running exactly as they were.

That's a pattern worth paying attention to if you live here or spend enough time here to think of it as home. The showcase spots will keep changing hands as chefs move on to their next projects. The places that survive changes in ownership and concept tend to be the ones tied to a routine rather than a reputation. If Agrá is still around in five years serving something entirely different again, that won't be surprising. If Sano Banano is still serving the same breakfast in five years, that won't be surprising either.

For now, if you haven't been to nYa since the switch, it's worth a visit just to see what wild gastronomy means in practice. And if you haven't been up to the Mariposario gardens in a while, the beer list hasn't changed, but that's sort of the point.

If you're thinking about property in this part of the Nicoya Peninsula and want a read on how a town's character holds up over time, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground detail Elizabeth Gómez tracks for clients evaluating Montezuma against the rest of the coast. Let's Connect.