Krioyo Food in Curaçao: What and Where to Eat

Krioyo food is the everyday cooking of Curaçao: goat stew, cheese stuffed with spiced meat, cornmeal porridge, and fried pastries sold at roadside snack bars from early morning. "Krioyo" is the Papiamentu word for "creole," and the cuisine is a hearty, homestyle blend of African, Dutch, Spanish, indigenous Arawak, Latin American and wider Caribbean influences. It is what people cook at home and queue for at lunch, not restaurant food dressed up for tourists.

This guide covers the dishes worth ordering, the markets and kitchens where locals actually eat them, and the honest story behind the liqueur that put Curaçao's name on cocktail menus worldwide.

The core krioyo dishes

A handful of dishes show up on nearly every krioyo menu and family table. Learn these and you can order confidently anywhere on the island.

Keshi yena (stuffed cheese)

Keshi yena means "stuffed cheese" in Papiamentu: "keshi" comes from the Dutch word for cheese, "kaas," and "yena" means filled or stuffed. The dish is a shell of Edam or Gouda cheese packed with spiced meat, usually chicken, often with olives and raisins, baked or steamed until the cheese softens around the filling. It is believed to have originated in the Dutch colonial and slavery era, when enslaved people on the islands took leftover rinds of imported Edam and Gouda and stuffed them with table scraps from the landowners' kitchens, turning discarded rind into a full meal. Both Aruba and Curaçao claim keshi yena as a national dish, reflecting shared Dutch Caribbean history.

Kabritu stoba and karni stoba (goat and beef stew)

Kabritu stoba, goat stew, is one of the island's most iconic krioyo dishes: goat meat slow simmered with onions, tomatoes, peppers and local spices until tender, served with funchi or white rice, and a fixture at family gatherings and celebrations. Karni stoba, beef stew, is the everyday counterpart: seasoned beef browned then simmered with onion, pepper, tomato and garlic, with steamed green papaya and potatoes often stirred in toward the end. There is also banana stobá, a recognized plantain-stew variant where nearly ripe, yellow-skinned plantains are cooked directly into a meat stew.

Funchi and tutu (cornmeal porridge)

Funchi is Curaçao's staple starch: a cornmeal porridge similar to polenta, made by stirring cornmeal into boiling water seasoned with butter and salt, traditionally worked with a mealie or funchi stick. A direct carryover from African cuisine, it is served as a soft mound or, once stiffened, shaped into firm dumplings, and it turns up beside the island's stews. Tutu is its black-eyed-pea cousin: cornmeal cooked with mashed black-eyed peas, garlic, onion, nutmeg and a touch of sugar, mixed with a lélé (a traditional wooden whisk) until thick and stiff. Order tutu at least once for the contrast.

Pastechi and batidos

Pastechi is a crescent-shaped, deep-fried pastry similar to an empanada, found all over Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire. The dough is slightly sweet, and fillings run from cheese to tuna or other seafood to chicken or ground meat. It is the default breakfast or anytime snack, sold at roadside snack bars and bakeries; smaller versions, roughly 10 centimeters, are passed around at local parties. To eat like a local, grab one from a bakery counter for breakfast and eat it standing up.

Batidos are fresh tropical fruit shakes, blended with milk or condensed milk and sugar, in flavors like mango, papaya, soursop, tamarind and passion fruit, sold from roadside stands and trucks, including well-known operators like 100% Batidos and Anders Shakes in Willemstad. 100% Batidos runs as a mobile stand parked in front of Plasa Bieu in Punda, blending made-to-order shakes and juices from fresh local fruit, including passion fruit and lychee, from around 7am until late afternoon. Pair one with a pastechi and breakfast is covered.

Where locals actually eat: markets and communal kitchens

The best introduction to krioyo food is not a restaurant menu, it is a market hall with communal tables. Curaçao has three markets worth knowing, though status shifts, so check current hours before planning around one.

Plasa Bieu (Old Market)

Plasa Bieu, also called Marshé Bieu, is a covered former market hall in Punda containing six separate open kitchens, each run by its own cook, sharing long communal tables with no private seating. Typical dishes include goat and beef stew, funchi, kadushi (cactus soup), fresh fried fish, pumpkin pancakes and vegetarian bean and vegetable stews, and because each kitchen is independent, the menu changes daily by cook. As of 2025, documented hours run roughly Monday through Saturday 10am to 3pm and Sunday 11am to 2pm; it is lunch-only, so do not plan on dinner here. As of late April 2026, Plasa Bieu was next in line for renovation (restroom work and roof repairs) once the nearby Marshé Nobo restoration wraps up, with no official start date announced, so confirm status close to your travel dates.

Marshé Nobo and the Floating Market

Marshé Nobo, the large round market building in Punda that historically housed food stalls on the ground floor and crafts and clothing upstairs, closed for renovation in August 2024. Its roughly 78 vendors relocated temporarily to nearby streets, including Sha Capriles Kade and Plenchi Wilson Papa Godett. As of spring 2026 the renovation was nearing completion, with no reopening date confirmed.

The Floating Market on Sha Caprileskade has a story worth knowing. Venezuelan merchants have docked boats here to sell produce and fish since 1918, but it went dormant after Venezuela shut its maritime and air border with Curaçao in 2019 amid a diplomatic dispute. The border reopened in April 2023 and the market has been reviving since, though it remains much reduced: as of 2024 reporting, only about six of the roughly thirty Venezuelan boats that used to supply it by sea had resumed the trip. It operates Monday through Friday, 7am to 2pm, and 2026 visitor reviews confirm it is still active.

Comparing Curaçao's three Punda food markets

Market	What it's for	Hours	Status
Plasa Bieu	Sit-down krioyo lunch, six independent kitchens, communal tables	Mon-Sat 10am-3pm, Sun 11am-2pm (2025 data)	Open; renovation expected, no start date as of April 2026
Marshé Nobo	Food stalls plus crafts and clothing, historic round market building	Closed for renovation since August 2024	Nearing completion as of spring 2026; reopening date unconfirmed
Floating Market	Fresh produce and seafood sold from Venezuelan boats	Mon-Fri 7am-2pm	Active but reduced; confirmed operating in 2026 reviews

Restaurants worth the trip

Beyond the markets, a handful of sit-down spots handle the dishes that need more kitchen time than a market stall can give them.

Jaanchie's Restaurant, Westpunt

Jaanchie's, in Sabana Westpunt, is widely described as the oldest restaurant on Curaçao, reportedly founded in 1936 and approaching its 90th year in 2026, with reviews from May and June 2026 confirming it is still operating. It has no fixed printed menu: the owner traditionally comes to each table to describe what is available that day. Jaanchie's is best known for iguana stew, with goat stew, chicken and fish as alternatives. Iguana soup and stew, called sopi or stoba di yuana, is a genuinely traditional dish still eaten today; locals nickname iguanas "tree chickens," stew is the most common preparation, and the meat carries a local reputation for aphrodisiac properties, best treated as folklore. Jaanchie's is at Westpunt 266, phone +5999 864-0126, and pairs naturally with a day exploring Westpunt at the island's western end.

For a wider spread of listings, from casual lunch counters to sit-down dining rooms serving krioyo classics, browse our full restaurant guide. An organized Willemstad walking food tour is a practical way to taste several dishes in one outing, and it combines well with our Willemstad walking guide for a full day on foot around Willemstad.

Blue Curaçao: the honest version of the story

No krioyo food guide is complete without the liqueur that shares the island's name, partly because the real story is more interesting than the marketing. Genuine Curaçao liqueur is made from the dried peels of the laraha, a bitter orange that adapted to the island's conditions. The fruit itself is too bitter and fibrous to eat, but its dried peels are pleasantly aromatic, and that peel, not the fruit, is the actual product. The laraha descends from Seville orange trees brought to Curaçao from Spain in 1527; the trees failed to thrive in the arid climate, and the abandoned fruit evolved over generations into the smaller, more bitter laraha known today. The name is a clue to that origin: "laraha" is cognate with "laranja," the Portuguese word for orange.

The best-known producer is Senior & Co, founded in 1896 by Haim Mendes Chumaceiro, a pharmacist who ran the Botika Excelsior drugstore, together with Edgar Senior. Their drink was first sold as "Senior's Curaçao Tonic" before being renamed Senior's Curaçao Liqueur, and descendants of both families still hold a stake in the company. Senior & Co bills itself as the only brand making genuine Curaçao liqueur from dried native laraha peels since 1896, a company claim rather than an independently verified fact, though the surrounding history checks out: the company purchased the recipe from Chumaceiro's widow in 1945 to begin producing it commercially, and the distillery has operated from the historic Landhuis Chobolobo in Salina, Willemstad since the late 1940s.

Here is the part most bottles do not tell you: Curaçao liqueur is naturally colorless. The blue version, typically dyed with the food colorant E133, along with orange and other colored variants, is artificially colored. Blue Curaçao is a marketing invention layered onto a genuine product, and it worked well enough that the name "Curaçao" became internationally associated with the color blue specifically because of it. That does not make the liqueur less real; it means the blue in your cocktail glass is styling, not flavor.

The Curaçao Liqueur Distillery at Landhuis Chobolobo is reported to draw more than 200,000 visitors a year. Entrance to the estate, store, courtyard and distillery is free for a self-guided walk-through. A Standard Guided Tour runs about $20 per person for about an hour, with a tasting plus one cocktail or non-alcoholic drink. A Deluxe Guided Tour runs $30 per person, also about an hour, with liqueur tastes, two tropical cocktails and a locally made ice cream. Guided tours run Monday through Friday; the site itself is open Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, closed weekends.

Planning your krioyo eating itinerary

A sensible one-day version: pastechi and a batido for breakfast, lunch at Plasa Bieu for stew and funchi, an afternoon detour to Landhuis Chobolobo on a weekday, and dinner back in Willemstad. Save Jaanchie's for a day you are already headed toward Westpunt. None of it requires more Papiamentu than the dish names above. From a cheese shell born of leftover rinds to a bitter orange left behind by failed Spanish orange trees, krioyo food is what necessity and history taste like. Eat it where the six kitchens of Plasa Bieu are cooking it, not where it is printed on a laminated menu for tourists.