This Costa Rica bar is rebuilding classic cocktails through regional flavor
Hidden inside Nekajui Peninsula Papagayo, its menu explores Costa Rica one region at a time — from Guanacaste's tamarind and chiles to Tarrazú's coffee and cacao.
Key Points
- Cooper’s cocktail program uses Costa Rican ingredients and regional flavor profiles to reinterpret classic drinks through a distinctly local lens.
- Sustainability drives the bar’s beverage philosophy, with mango skins, avocado pits, cacao husks, and coffee husks repurposed into housemade cocktail ingredients.
- Cooper’s uses techniques like redistillation, clarification, and fermentation to preserve seasonal ingredients and build layered, spirit-forward cocktails.
At Cooper’s, the cocktail bar hidden inside Puna restaurant at Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve property in Costa Rica’s Peninsula Papagayo, a martini arrives carrying the unmistakable aroma of local goat cheese.
The cheese never actually enters the glass. The bar team blends goat cheese into vodka, then redistills it, leaving behind only its aroma and flavor. Fino sherry replaces olive brine, while clarified pineapple and thyme-infused honey round out the drink.
“That’s the game we are playing also to trick people’s minds and palates,” says Angelo Solimando, Nekajui’s head of beverage and bars program.
The cocktail, called the Turrialba, takes its name from the Costa Rican region known for both coffee and cheese. It also captures the larger philosophy behind Cooper’s: classic cocktails rebuilt through Costa Rican ingredients, regional identity, and modern culinary technique.
 Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve property in Peninsula Papagayo, is home to Cooper’s — a sustainable speakeasy that champions Costa Rican flavors.Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve property in Peninsula Papagayo, is home to Cooper’s — a sustainable speakeasy that champions Costa Rican flavors. Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |  Nekajui, which means “lush garden,” spans 1,400 acres and overlooks the Pacific Ocean.Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve Nekajui, which means “lush garden,” spans 1,400 acres and overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |  The property houses nine hospitality concepts, all of which are sustainable.Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve The property houses nine hospitality concepts, all of which are sustainable. Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |
Costa Rica is not one flavor
For Solimando, Costa Rica cannot be reduced to a generic “tropical” profile.
“If we are talking about Guanacaste,” he says, referring to the northwestern province where Nekajui sits, “I’m not gonna give you mango. I’m gonna give you something that has spices like tamarind, black pepper, and a little bit of chile.”
Costa Rica’s Caribbean side leans toward pineapple, coconut, and mango. Guanacaste brings tamarind, dragon fruit, achiote, and local chiles. In the country’s central regions, coffee and cacao dominate.
Those regional distinctions run throughout Cooper’s menu. The Milano Via San Jose combines distilled guava, sweet vermouth, Campari, and avocado leaf distillate. Bodega Aromatica layers aged rum with cinnamon, cashew leaf, coffee tincture, and Cooper’s in-house bitters. Terruño Tarrazú brings together Costa Rican single-origin coffee, raw cacao bean, cascara, and aromatic cream.
Underneath the distillates, fermentations, and clarifications, the structure remains classic. “We have hundreds of years of history in bartending,” says Solimando. “Half of the work is already done by our ancestors.”
Martinis, Negronis, stirred spirit-forward cocktails, and highballs become frameworks for Costa Rican ingredients rather than departures from cocktail tradition.
Cooper’s, the hidden bar beneath Puna restaurant, is named after Simon Cooper, a the former president and COO of Ritz-Carlton and Marriott’s luxury division. Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve
Rebuilding the Dirty Martini
The Turrialba began with the dirty martini, a drink many American guests already recognize.
“There is a region very close to San Jose which is called Turrialba,” says Solimando. “They are very famous for coffee, but more famous for cheeses.”
Instead of blue cheese and olive brine — the expected references in a Dirty Martini — Cooper’s built the drink around local goat cheese distillate and fino sherry.
“We take vodka, we blend it together with goat cheese, we redistill it,” he says. “So we have a clean vodka, crystal clear, that has no cheese inside but has all the aroma volatiles and notes from the goat cheese.”
The Turrialba, a reimagined martini, is one of Cooper’s signature cocktails and is made with redistilled, cheese-infused vodka. Credit: Photo by Sean Davis for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve
The distillation process also omits potential dairy allergens or intolerances, such as whey proteins and lactose. “Even somebody that is allergic to lactose can have that cocktail because there is no cheese,” says Solimando.
Fino sherry supplies the salinity usually delivered by olive brine, while clarified pineapple juice and thyme-infused honey subtly adjust the drink’s texture and balance without announcing themselves.
“You don’t realize there is honey,” says Solimando, “but you have a little back flavor.”
Inside Cooper’s beverage lab
Much of Cooper’s seasonal menu is built before guests ever sit at the bar.
The team works from a separate beverage lab where they experiment with clarification, fermentation, carbonation, tinctures, and redistillation. Some ingredients cooperate easily. Others behave unpredictably.
“If you take basil, for example, and you infuse basil, the alcohol will destroy all the flavor of basil,” says Solimando.
Rosemary behaves differently. Ylang-ylang flowers can be distilled into shelf-stable perfumes. Seasonal ingredients can be preserved and reworked into tinctures, powders, syrups, and distillates.
“We take advantage of the season,” says Solimando., “The season to get it, to get the product and think how I can process it to keep it shelf stable.”
That experimentation can take months.
“So you have to sit there — okay, I have the flavor profile of mango and the passion fruit or pineapple and coconut,” he says. “Okay, sounds like a Piña Colada. How can I elevate a Piña Colada to a Cooper’s-style cocktail?”
The result is a cocktail program that feels technical without becoming overly scientific in presentation. Guests encounter the final drink, not the chemistry behind it.
 To get to Cooper’s, one must go through a hidden door within Puna, helmed by chef Diego Muñoz.Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve To get to Cooper’s, one must go through a hidden door within Puna, helmed by chef Diego Muñoz. Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |  By day, Puna morphs into Mirador, Nekajui’s main morning spot, serving its popular Reserve Breakfast.Credit: Photo by Andres Garcia Lachner for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve By day, Puna morphs into Mirador, Nekajui’s main morning spot, serving its popular Reserve Breakfast. Credit: Photo by Andres Garcia Lachner for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |
Sustainability through flavor
At Cooper’s, sustainability is less a branding exercise than a way of extracting more flavor from ingredients that would normally be discarded. “Sustainability is a lifestyle,” says Solimando. “You need to change your chip in your mind in everyday choices.”
Mango skins become fermentation starters because of the natural yeast living on the peel. Avocado pits are roasted, crushed, and treated like nuts for housemade orgeat. Fruit peels, cacao husks, and leaves are made into infusions and tinctures.
Coffee is one of the clearest examples. Nekajui buys green coffee and roasts it in-house in its cafe, giving the beverage team access not only to the beans, but to the papery husks removed during processing. “We don’t buy roasted coffee, we buy green coffee and we have our roaster,” says Solimando. “Nobody does anything with the coffee husks, but coffee husk is a beautiful flavor of nuts and tamarind.”
Those husks are infused into sherry to create a house ingredient that tastes adjacent to coffee without tasting like brewed coffee itself — nuttier, drier, and more tart.
 The Milano Via San Jose combines distilled guava, sweet vermouth, Campari, and avocado leaf distillate.Credit: Photo by Sean Davis for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve The Milano Via San Jose combines distilled guava, sweet vermouth, Campari, and avocado leaf distillate. Credit: Photo by Sean Davis for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |  Mangas Para Todos boasts homemade mango vinegar and white chocolate distillate, combined with bourbon.Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve Mangas Para Todos boasts homemade mango vinegar and white chocolate distillate, combined with bourbon. Credit: Courtesy of Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |  Terruño Tarrazú brings together Costa Rican single-origin coffee, raw cacao bean, cascara, and aromatic cream.Credit: Photo by Sean Davis for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve Terruño Tarrazú brings together Costa Rican single-origin coffee, raw cacao bean, cascara, and aromatic cream. Credit: Photo by Sean Davis for Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve |
The same philosophy shapes the team’s approach to seasonality. Rather than building rigid recipes around one fruit, cocktails are designed to adapt as ingredients cycle in and out of season. “If I’m designing a cocktail that has mango, when the mango season is over, how can I replace all the fruit but leave the same style of cocktail?” says Solimando.
That flexibility matters in Costa Rica, where small-scale agriculture often means ingredients can disappear quickly or fluctuate throughout the year.
A speakeasy where the drinks matter most
Cooper’s still retains the mechanics of a traditional speakeasy. The entrance is hidden. Staff communicate through coded radio calls. Guests exit through another concealed door. But the secrecy is not the most interesting thing about the bar, and Solimando does not want the setting to overshadow the drinks.
“We are trying to let the experience start before you are in the bar,” he says.
But he is careful not to let the theatrics overshadow the cocktails themselves. “Nowadays, it’s very easy to find bars that are defining themselves as speakeasies, but in reality, they are just cocktail bars,” he says. “They just say speakeasy to mean cocktail bar.”
At Cooper’s, named after longtime Ritz-Carlton executive Simon Cooper, former president and COO of Ritz-Carlton and Marriott’s luxury division, the hidden entrance works because the drinks sustain the mystery around them: a martini scented with goat cheese distillate, coffee husks infused into sherry, and tamarind and chile threaded through cocktails shaped by Costa Rica’s geography rather than generic tropical shorthand.
“The surrounding is just a garnish,” says Solimando. “That completes your experience of enjoying the drink. But what’s really the star there is the drink.”
