What local dishes should I try in Belize, and where should I look for them?

Belize's single most useful piece of food information is a legal date. The Fisheries Department's close-season notice shuts the lobster fishery from February 15 until midnight on June 14, and possession during the closure is an offense under Section 3(1)(b) of the Fisheries Regulation, Chapter 210 of the Subsidiary Laws of Belize. Any restaurant offering lobster in March or April is either serving frozen stock or breaking the law, and travelers who arrive in the dry high season — which runs November to May — are arriving in the closed half of the year.

What is always available is better anyway. Rice and beans here means red kidney beans and rice cooked together in coconut milk, which is a different dish from beans and rice served separately. It comes with stew chicken, reddened and deepened with recado, a paste of annatto seed. Breakfast is fry jacks, puffed squares of fried dough, with refried beans. These are the constants from Corozal to Punta Gorda.

Then the country divides. The Mestizo north — Corozal and Orange Walk — is where to look for salbutes and garnaches, small fried corn tortillas topped with chicken or beans, and for escabeche, an onion-and-vinegar chicken soup. The southern coast, around Dangriga and Hopkins, is Garifuna, and the dish to seek out is hudut: fish in a coconut broth with mashed green and ripe plantain pounded in a mortar. Toledo in the far south is the cacao district, which follows directly from the rainfall — the national meteorological service records up to 160 inches (4,064 mm) of rain a year there against 60 inches (1,524 mm) in the north.

In the Garifuna towns the mortar used for hudut is a hollowed log worked with a heavy wooden pestle, and the pounding is loud enough to hear from the road. Toledo's cacao dries on raised wooden trays in whatever sun the wettest district in Belize provides, which is why the drying sheds there have roofs that roll back.

The closed season is not a suggestion aimed at fishermen alone. Because the lobster closure runs February 15 to June 14 and the dry season runs November to May, the best months to travel and the best months to eat lobster barely overlap — the sweet spot is the second half of June through to the start of the rains' retreat in November, which is also hurricane season, defined by NOAA's National Hurricane Center as June 1 to November 30. There is no month that gives you dry weather and open lobster season together.

• Breakfast — Fry jacks with beans, anywhere in the country; it is the one meal that does not vary by district.
• Lunch — Rice and beans with stew chicken, ordered as a single item rather than as components.
• Dinner, on the southern coast — Hudut in Dangriga or Hopkins, which needs to be ordered ahead in small kitchens because of the pounding involved.

The best eating is in the smallest towns, and the road network funnels through Belize City, which the US Department of State rates Level 3, Reconsider Travel, inside an overall Level 2 advisory for Belize. Travelers leaving by land, or by water to Guatemala or Mexico, pay 40 Belize dollars or 20 US dollars at the border, so a food-led loop through the south and out to Guatemala has a cost attached. UK passport holders have 30 days visa-free, which is enough for the north-to-south run but not for lingering in each district.

The places-and-experiences answer in this group follows the same district geography on the ground, and the trip-planning answer sets out entry rules, taxes and how long to allow.