about

We started with a simple frustration.

Costa Rica feeds millions of visitors a year, and most of them leave without tasting it. They eat well — but they eat the same menu they could have eaten anywhere. Meanwhile the cacao, the corn, the fish and the cheese that make this country worth cooking sit two roads away, in the hands of people nobody introduced them to.

SYVA exists to close that distance. One table at a time.

Chef Stephanie Molina preparing herbs in a private kitchen

Quality is not imported. It is already here — it just has to be cooked properly.

Stephanie Molina · Head Chef
Stephanie Molina, head chef and founder of SYVA

the chef

Stephanie Molina.

Stephanie is a young Costa Rican chef who decided not to wait for a restaurant to give her permission. She built her own kitchen instead — one that travels, that answers to no menu but the season, and that puts her in front of the people she cooks for.

She designs every SYVA menu, leads the kitchen and presents each course herself. That last part is not a flourish: she wants you to know what you are eating, who grew it and why it tastes the way it does. It is the part of the job she refuses to delegate.

Manrique Rojas cooks alongside her and runs the service. Two people, one event at a time, nothing outsourced.

Stephanie Molina with a Guanacaste ceramic artisan

the makers

We buy from people, not shelves.

The plates we serve on are not props. Much of our ceramic comes from Guanacaste workshops where families have shaped Chorotega clay the same way for generations — dug from the same hillsides, burnished with river stones, fired in wood ovens. When a course arrives on that clay, it arrives with a name attached.

The same is true of the food. Farms, ferias, ceramicists, fishers at the dock before sunrise. We would rather drive an hour for the right thing than order the convenient one.

Chorotega ceramics from Guanacaste, Costa Rica
Hand-thrown clay bowl held in the workshop
Fresh Costa Rican produce bought at the market
Traditional Costa Rican wood-fired kitchen
Costa Rican fisherman with the morning catch

the source

The menu is written by the morning.

We design your menu before we travel, and then the market has the last word. If the snapper that came up is better than the one we planned for, the snapper wins. If the mangoes are two weeks from ready, they wait.

That is not improvisation. It is the only honest way to cook a country where three climates can sit within an hour of each other, and where the same dish tastes different on each coast.

what we believe

Three things we will not trade.

i

Identity over imitation

We are not trying to cook like somewhere else. Costa Rican ingredients, technique that respects them, and no apology for either.

ii

Small, on purpose

One event at a time. Stephanie in the kitchen, Manrique on the floor. Growth that costs us that is not growth.

iii

Everything traceable

Every producer has a name and we will tell you it. If we cannot say where something came from, it does not reach your table.

The table is already yours.

Tell us the occasion and where you are staying. We come to you, and we bring the rest.

Plan your evening