Lily Beach restaurant by restaurant: Lily Maa, Tamarind, teppanyaki and Les Turquoise d’Aqua

Lily Maa takes its name from the local word for flower and is the resort’s main restaurant: a buffet on a sand floor, with live cooking stations, a grill and a barbecue. Dinner follows a weekly calendar. Monday is East Meets West, Tuesday the Seafood Extravaganza, Wednesday Asia and street food, Thursday the chef’s market, Friday the Maldivian night, Saturday the Mediterranean and Sunday ‘famous classics around the world’. The Platinum Plan keeps 20 European cheeses on the counter at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Lily Maa also has a live lobster tank: you pick your lobster and say how you want it cooked, with a reservation and a supplementary charge whose amount the page leaves out.

Tamarind stands over the water, with open decks outside and a chandelier hung with a golden garland above the cooking station. Its menu is half Thai, half Indian: tom yam koong, pad thai with prawns, green curry chicken and black pepper beef on one side; butter chicken, lamb dopiaza, tandoori chicken tikka and naan 4 ways on the other. Mango with sticky rice or gulab jamun closes the meal. The Chef’s Special, 4 courses with half a lobster stir-fried in red curry paste, costs $65++ per person and sits outside the plan.

Teppanyaki is cooked every evening at AQVA, on an iron griddle with room for 12 around it, by chefs who flip and juggle as they go. The dinner menu is priced at $150++ and brings shiitake miso soup and hibachi garlic fried rice, starters such as salmon tataki and fried soft-shell crab, then reef fish or tuna, or Australian Angus tenderloin or Wagyu rib eye, and a matcha cheesecake. A full lobster tail is $75++ more. Les Turquoise d’Aqua is the fine-dining table: a 5-course tasting menu that goes from scallops with Beluga caviar to lamb loin, brown-butter sea bass, Black Angus tenderloin in truffle sauce and tiramisu bonbons. Its menu, headed Wine & Dine, names a wine beside most courses and prints $100++ per person; there is a vegetarian version. That file is dated 14 April 2025 and still prints 16% GST where the teppanyaki menu of May 2026 prints 17%, so confirm the price when you reserve.

At lunch the buffet has 2 à la carte alternatives. AQVA, on the sunset side beside the infinity pool, is a quiet zone for guests aged 16 and over; its lunch menu runs from reef fish tartare and beef carpaccio to a grilled seafood platter, the catch of the day and a shrimp risotto. Vibes, beside the 2 pools where the families gather, is the lively one, and twice a week a live band or a DJ plays there after dark. The Spirit Bar, with sand underfoot and shisha available, is the place for the first espresso and the last glass.

In the Google reviews collected on 5 October 2026 the buffet draws both the warmest lines and the sharpest. A guest writing in September 2026 loved Lily Maa and chose Vibes for lunch, and found some of Tamarind’s dishes too spicy. Another, in January 2026, ate at all 4 restaurants and calls the service at AQVA, Vibes and Tamarind impeccable and Lily Maa’s inconsistent, with used plates left on the table for more than 15 minutes. A one-star review of April 2026 found little choice at the buffet and liked the other restaurants better. A guest in March 2026 thanks the kitchen for its care over food intolerances and allergies, and one in August 2026 warns that the birds at AQVA help themselves to your plate.

Ayada is the closest in shape: a main buffet with a theme that changes daily, a teppanyaki grill and a restaurant over the water, 8 outlets in all. Emerald Maldives runs 4 restaurants under a plan it calls Deluxe All-Inclusive. Soneva Fushi speaks of over 10 culinary experiences, among them a sushi counter and rooms for cheese and chocolate that stay open round the clock.