Caretta on the Gulf

The Restaurant

Caretta on the Gulf opened at the Sandpearl Resort in 2007 as the flagship dining room of the first AAA Four-Diamond beachfront hotel built on Clearwater Beach in forty years. The restaurant takes its name from Caretta caretta — the loggerhead sea turtles that nest each summer on the sand directly outside the dining room's west wall — and the staff still pause service on summer evenings when a hatch reaches the water. The interior, redesigned in 2022, runs cool palm-green and ivory across an open ninety-seat room that opens through bifold glass doors onto a wraparound covered terrace facing the Gulf of Mexico.

The kitchen serves a New American menu with deliberate South-American, Caribbean, and Mediterranean inflections — a programme written by executive chef Ralph Foltz around the produce coming off the Florida growing calendar and the boats coming into nearby John's Pass. Signature plates include the wood-roasted Florida grouper with stone-crab beurre blanc, the seared diver scallops with celery-root purée and brown-butter pecans, the dry-aged Wagyu strip from the wood-burning oven, and a Caretta sushi-and-raw-bar selection that turns daily on the morning's catch. The all-organic, all-natural wine programme — about two hundred and forty labels, organised by producer rather than region — won a 2024 Wine Spectator Award of Excellence.

Service is at the upper tier of Florida's Gulf Coast: career servers, captain-led service rounds, table-side preparations for the Caesar and the bananas Foster, and a sommelier who walks the room twice each evening. The dining room closes at 10pm year-round, but the connected lounge runs until midnight Sunday through Thursday and 1am on weekends. The Tripadvisor Travelers' Choice 2026 ranking — #11 in the United States, ahead of every other restaurant in Pinellas County — confirmed what Sandpearl regulars have argued for years: this is the room that the rest of the Tampa Bay west coast is measured against.