Villa Bokéh

Tortillas at the center of the pass

Marcos Saenz lays the work on tortillas made fresh daily as Chef at Villa Bokéh in Antigua, Guatemala, where Guatemalan nouvelle cuisine begins with the garden and the hand. His station here is executive chef, a role that asks him to hold the hotel’s Relais & Châteaux polish close to a local grammar of seed, volcanic soil, seasonal harvest and masa. The kitchen’s named signature is not a plated flourish but Signature Tortillas, present at the meal as a staple with Mayan roots.

Saenz’s line runs through Antigua Guatemala and beyond it. He worked at Casa Santo Domingo with Chef Mario Campollo Sarti, a Guatemalan point of apprenticeship that sits plainly in his biography. He also worked at Mugaritz in San Sebastián, and has said that experience changed his perspective and vision of cooking. At Villa Bokéh, that wider training returns to a narrower discipline: organic and local products, handled with technique, creativity and aesthetics, without dressing Guatemala as somewhere else. His own boundary is exact: "We are not trying to be a European hotel in Guatemala. We celebrate who we are, proudly and without compromise."

Ancient seeds, garden produce, modern technique

Bokéh 3.1, the restaurant inside the house, builds its menu from the property’s own garden, local farms, ancient seeds and the mineral language of volcanic earth. The cooking is à la carte rather than ceremonial, but the method has a program’s structure: traditional recipes are reworked with contemporary technique, and the plate keeps its Guatemalan center. Casa Cristal Bistro shares the same ground in a lighter register, drawing on Mayan agricultural traditions for breakfast, brunch and midday plates.

The daily tortilla matters because it fixes the kitchen to repetition. Masa is not a garnish here; it is the thing that returns at every meal, a measure of freshness and touch. Around it, Saenz’s kitchen moves through indigenous ingredients and modern forms: tuna tostadas, pumpkin ravioli, wild mushroom fettuccine, tres leches cake, Mayan chocolate sweets, grilled fish and shrimp. The point is not fusion as display. It is a working vocabulary, with local product first and technique in service to it.

Light through the greenhouse room

The room keeps the pace low. Villa Bokéh was restored from a colonial-style hacienda and former artists’ residence, with terracotta tiles, red pantile roofs, whitewashed walls, dark beams, turrets and cypress trees set across six acres of gardens. Bokéh 3.1 takes the form of a contemporary greenhouse, cut by light and quiet rather than spectacle. Casa Cristal looks toward gardens, lagoon water and Volcán de Agua, so the counterpoint to the pass is always visible: soil, leaf, water, cone.

Service sits in an upscale casual register, but the atmosphere is not the subject. The subject is the way the room allows the craft to stay audible: tortillas moving from hand to table, morning plates in the bistro, evening dishes built from the same garden logic. In Antigua, Saenz also carries that line into his 2025 role as a judge for Cocinando con Flores, another local table where technique meets Guatemalan product. At Villa Bokéh, the clearest close remains the daily Signature Tortillas.