Marmalade Restaurant & Wine Bar

The story

Crafted with passion, served with love

A Chef's Life on a Plate

Peter Schintler grew up in eastern Iowa, the son of a farmer's son and an aspiring writer, always gravitating toward the kitchen while the other men talked sports. That pull led him to the Baltimore International Culinary College, graduating top of his class in 1991, and then abroad — training under Certified Master Chef Peter Timmins in Ireland, becoming the first American cook at Raymond Blanc's Le Manoir Aux Quat'Saisons in Oxfordshire, working alongside an Alain Ducasse protégé at Le Cirque in Manhattan, and immersing himself in truffle cookery at La Contea in Piedmont. He cooked at the James Beard House, ran a celebrated restaurant atop the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore that earned "Best Hotel Restaurant in the World," and eventually found his way to the shores of Puerto Rico.

The Idea Behind Marmalade

What Schintler found on the island was a food culture with deep identity — Caribbean, Spanish, Latin American, and American threads woven together — but one rooted in starch, meat, and deep-frying. His response was Marmalade, built around vegetables, alkalinity, lighter cooking methods, and organic and sustainable ingredients sourced from local farmers alongside the best available products worldwide. "Believing in our passion for vegetable, alkalinity, and lighter cooking method with organic and sustainable foods, the idea of Marmalade was born," he writes. Fourteen-plus years on, the restaurant has quietly shifted how some people eat in Puerto Rico.

Tasting Menus and a Celebrated Wine List

Marmalade serves exclusively tasting menus — a five-course format at $155 per person, with an optional wine pairing at $105. The kitchen is happy to adapt courses to dietary preferences. Dishes on the menu reflect the restaurant's playful, ingredient-driven approach: fluke sashimi finished with lemongrass ponzu, red snapper ceviche cured with citrus and grapefruit alongside tostones, Moroccan-spiced ahi tuna tartar served with freshly made flatbread, and bite-size crispy paella filled with smoked chicken and saffron-garlic espuma. The American and Caribbean influences show up in both the produce and the technique — global in reference, grounded in the island.

The wine program is the other pillar. Marmalade holds the Wine Spectator Best of Award of Excellence, a distinction the restaurant has earned consistently since 2008 — eleven consecutive times and counting. It is Puerto Rico's only list to have achieved that record, and the pairing menu is built to match it course by course.

The Room and the Philosophy

Marmalade sits on Fortaleza Street in Old San Juan, one of the Caribbean's most storied historic corridors. Schintler's philosophy, shaped by his wife Henriett's influence on wellness and by raising a vegetarian daughter named Siena, runs through everything: "Food is like music — you need not have a favorite, only a mood." The team he has built around that idea is described as "over achievers and obsessive perfectionists," and the restaurant's continued recognition reflects it. A cookbook collecting thirty years of cooking, twenty years of marriage, and the full arc of Marmalade's story is in the works — written, Schintler says, for his daughter, so she can one day understand her father's passion.