Los Cabos

The Cape · Carretera Transpeninsular km 5, Cabo San Lucas

Enrique Olvera looked at Cabo, Mexico on one side, an enormous Pacific in front, and decided the useful culinary map ran outward. Manta moves between Mexico, Peru and Japan, three cuisines that have spent centuries understanding what to do when excellent fish arrives. Ceviches, sashimi-like preparations, tostadas, seafood, acid, chile and extraordinarily controlled cooking occupy a stripped-back dining room by Javier Sánchez, with El Arco providing the visual excess. Current chef de cuisine Abisai Sánchez keeps the Pacific logic intact. An A5 Wagyu T-bone can still end up in tacos. Book sunset because it happens behind El Arco.

Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal · Camino del Mar 1

First you walk through a mountain. The entrance to the Waldorf Astoria Pedregal is a tunnel bored through rock; on the other side, the resort appears between mountain and Pacific. For dinner you descend farther, toward a restaurant carved into the cliff where the waves are loud enough that the ocean has effectively joined the table. El Farallon displays the day's fish on ice, weighs your choice on an old-fashioned scale and grills it in the open kitchen. Before that, if civilization is functioning properly, there is Champagne on a terrace above the rocks. The Pacific is smashing itself against the cliff beside dinner. Have the fish. Look up occasionally.

Monuments Beach · Carretera Transpeninsular km 5, Cabo San Lucas

The Cape opened in 2015 with a look unlike the Cabo resort standard of the time. Javier Sánchez gave it exposed concrete, black surfaces, open-air circulation and a strong dose of Mexican mid-century modernism in place of another beige interpretation of “coastal luxury.” Every room faces El Arco. The lobby is open to the horizon. The rooftop gets crowded at sunset. Manta is downstairs. Monuments, one of Cabo's surf breaks, is directly in front. It was also the first hotel to open after Hurricane Odile, which had devastated Los Cabos the previous year. The Cape is social rather than secluded. Go upstairs around sunset and watch everybody independently pretend they discovered the same rooftop.

Santa Maria Bay · Carretera Transpeninsular km 12.5

The remarkable feature at Montage is water you can actually enter. Much of the Cabo corridor faces spectacular sea that is better contemplated than challenged. Montage occupies 39 acres around Santa Maria Bay, a protected marine sanctuary normally calm enough for swimming, snorkeling and diving directly from the beach. There are 122 rooms, a 40,000-square-foot spa, multiple restaurants and residences. The decisive luxury is simpler: walk into the bay with a mask and find fish, coral and clear water directly in front of the hotel.

El Médano · Avenida del Pescador, Cabo San Lucas

Edith Jiménez built Tres Sirenas near Médano around the daily Baja catch: oysters, raw preparations, shrimp and whole fish over fire. The ingredients are locally sourced where possible and the fish is allowed to arrive whole. Color, terraces and live music give the restaurant its volume. Put a whole fish in the middle of the table and let Cabo's weakness for excess do something useful for dinner.

Ánimas Bajas · foothills north of San José del Cabo

Flora Farms began with Gloria and Patrick Greene trying to grow food in a sandy patch of Ánimas Bajas and grew into a 25-acre agricultural universe containing fields, a restaurant, bakery, bar, shops, spa, cottages, cooking classes, ice cream and a population of people who drove down a dirt road for lunch and are now investigating real estate. The pizza reveals the level of obsession behind it. Patrick Greene spent roughly six months traveling through the important pizza cities of the world, eating and studying what they were doing. Then he came home and spent about another year treating a wood-fired oven as a laboratory, changing flour ratios, hydration, quantities, ingredients, fermentation, temperatures, cooking times and combinations thereof until the pizza behaved exactly as he wanted. The same intensity runs through the larger place. Flora grows the vegetables and herbs used in the kitchen; meats come from its nearby ranch; mozzarella, bread, sausages, preserves and ice cream are made within the system. Mama's Pizzeria alone now makes around fifteen Neapolitan-style pies from the wood-fired oven. Get the pizza because somebody attempted to solve it. Then walk around the fields and consider what happens when obsessive people are given twenty-five acres.