Beautiful Vacay - The Food

Happy new year!  I hope yours is off to a great start. 

We spent the first week of January on the white sand beaches of the Mayan Riviera, at the Excellence Riviera Cancun resort.  This resort is the most amazing, immaculate resort we've ever been to, far exceeding our expectations.  I'm going to break our trip down into two posts, one about the food, and one about the property.

There is just so much to say about the food ...

Food in the Room

The mini fridge is stocked daily with all the high-end bevvies you could want, as well as Snickers, Oreos, M&Ms, and Lays chips.  There is no extra charge for anything.
 
Room service is included at no extra charge, and is available 24/7.  There is a very extensive breakfast, lunch/dinner, and late night menu.  We took advantage of it quite a few times. 

 

 

We loved the bagel with lox or French toast for breakfast.  Christopher was a big fan of the clubhouse any time during the day, and I thought the quesadillas were a perfect late night snack.

If you're not out of bed yet in the morning, you can even have the food placed in a lock box that the server can unlock from outside your room, put the food in, and then you access from inside the room; you don't even have to see anyone if you don't want to.

Restaurants

There are over 10 restaurants at this resort, none of which require reservations.  We never had to wait to get into any of them, and you may visit any of them as many times as you want.  They all have very extensive menus that are displayed outside of the restaurant to peruse at your leisure.

Also, this resort caters to whatever your dietary needs might be.  All restaurants indicated the gluten-free dishes with a symbol (including the buffet, which also served up gluten-free bread), as well as heart-healthy dishes, vegetarian fare, etc. (See image below - this was typical of all the restaurants on the property):

The hostesses, servers, and even front desk staff (when you check in), ask about allergies/ food restrictions that you may have, and they provide consistent, top-quality service.

Spice is the Asian restaurant, serving up dishes such as sushi, pad Thai, curries, spiced duck, fried rice, soups, etc.  We shared a few rolls, some soup, and a lobster stir fry with huge chunks of perfectly cooked lobster.

Chez Isabelle is the French restaurant, and it was so good, we went back twice.  On New Years Eve we enjoyed the special multi-course menu, both having bacon wrapped steaks as our main. 

We were impressed that the steaks tasted like at home - and it's hard to compare to Western Canadian beef.  The second time we visited this restaurant I had the duck confit, and was blown away.

The Lobster House is open for breakfast, lunch or dinner, and has a separate, extensive menu for each.  The breakfast menu has typical dishes like eggs benedict, pancakes, etc., and then the lunch menu offers up a variety of salads, soups, and seafood dishes.  We liked the fish tacos.

At dinner time, the menu includes soup, salads, appetizers, and a variety of seafood and meat dishes.  You can order steak and lobster every day if you want to.  We enjoyed lobster one day, mine steamed, and Christopher's grilled.  There are a variety of different infused butters to choose from for dipping, and numerous side choices.  There is no extra charge for lobster, like there tends to be at other resorts.

The Grill is the steak house, and it has everything you'd expect from a steak house.

It is open for lunch and dinner.  Christopher had a reuben sandwich, and I had braised short rib for lunch one day.

There is a Mexican restaurant, Agave, which we thought was surprisingly not great.  It was the only one we weren't impressed with, but we might have just had bad luck with what we ordered.

Barcelona is the Mediterranean-inspired buffet, open for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The selection at each meal was impressive, and we especially loved the wide range of fresh-made juices (with no added sugar or anything).  We had fresh beet juice, and potent green juice every day.

There are roses on each table in the buffet.  No detail is left out at this resort.  Also, all the food tasted fresh, and of high quality.  Everything was properly chilled, heated, etc.  The infused salts (at lunch and dinner) and sugars (at breakfast) were over the top - pretty cool.  I'm not a big dessert person, but the selections went on and on and on.

One of the two Italian restaurants, Oregano, is open for lunch or dinner, with separate menus for each. 

It's also connected to the buffet at lunch, so you can go in between both to grab food, and/or order pizza or pasta off of the lunch menu. 

So many choices of marinated veggies, cheeses, olive oils/ balsamics, and everything else.

There were about eight varieties of hummus, numerous delicious focaccia breads, from blue cheese to olive etc.  Everything was excellent.

 

This restaurant was so good, we often grabbed the various marinated vegetables, and other Mediterranean goodies for a snack, and had to go back twice for the lasagna.

The other Italian restaurant was open for dinner and had a variety of antipasti, soups/ salads, pizzas, and pasta dishes.

Flavor Market is a Spanish tapas restaurant open for dinner.

Our absolute favourite restaurant was Basmati, an incredible Indian restaurant.

We were absolutely blown away with this restaurant, and made sure to enjoy two dinners here.  Next time we visit this resort, we might just only eat at the Indian restaurant; it's as good as at home, and for each meal we had, we would have easily paid over $100 at home for it (and wouldn't have been disappointed).  The menu includes all the dishes you'd expect, with various appetizer, vegetarian, meat, rice, and naan choices.

I miss Basmati already.  Mmmmmm!

For those looking to catch a game on the big screen, the Sports Bar is a great place for bevvies and snacky food, and it's open late.

 

 

Other Food

If all that is not enough, there is a beautiful coffee shop where the baristas prepare any coffee drink you desire, sandwiches, yogurt parfaits, pastries, and fresh juices.

There are also daily coconuts:

Ice cream:

Crepes:

 
And fabulous wood fired pizzas thrown into a to-go box for you to enjoy wherever you like:

As you can probably tell, one week isn't enough to enjoy all the food choices this resort has to offer.  It's rare for resort food to be as good as the restaurants at home, but there were so many dishes at Excellence Riviera Cancun that we'd pay for again and again.  We won't even get started on the incredible high-end beverage selection ...

How was your new years eve?  What did you do?  What about New Years Day?  Is 2017 off to a good start for you?