Offbeat Eats

Our last review in Cancún was one of the more unusual places in the Hotel Zone, La Palapa Belga. First, it’s pretty well hidden; La Palapa Belga is not on the main drag (Ave Kulkulcan), or at one of the large resorts, but instead is located behind the Hotel Imperial Laguna, one of the Hotel Zone’s smaller boutique hotels. The signage is minimal, so you have to find the Hotel Imperial, wander through the lobby to the pool area behind it, and then head for the grass-roofed palapa, with a very nice outdoor terrace looking over the lagoon (complete with crocodiles). The second unique bit is is the cuisine; as the name implies, La Palapa Belga serves… Belgian food. Yup, Belgian food. That makes it one of the more unique spots around Cancún.

One of the major dining attractions of Cancún is seafood; we really enjoyed our first night’s outing to Captain’s Cove, so when looking for another dining option, we decided that a trip to Fred’s Seafood and Raw Bar was in order. Located about a mile north on Avenue Kulkulcan from Captain’s Cove, it’s another restaurant with a pleasant terrace overlooking the lagoon, offering a seafood-centric menu with a wide variety of both raw and cooked seafood.

For our next meal in the Hotel Zone, we decided to swing back to Mexican cuisine with a visit to Hacienda Sisal. Located at the partner resort The Royal Sands, Hacienda Sisal has a broad menu, relatively few of the surcharges for all-inclusive customers, and it was easy enough to catch the shuttle bus over there and avoid the usual taxi rigamarole. The restaurant itself is quite nice; it appears to be a converted ballroom, but it sports two large dining rooms (and possibly a third, although on our visit it appeared to have been converted to Covid-19 testing), a large bar, and live musical entertainment. Hacienda Sisal is a Mexican restaurant that’s distinctly aimed at the Hotel Zone tourists; the menu leans distinctly towards “Americanized Mexican” cuisine (for example, this is one of the few places we saw American-style fajitas on the menu) over “Authenic Mexican” or Yucatecan food, but they still had a nice cross-section of traditional moles, molcajetes, and carnitas dishes as well.

Our third night in Cancún was another indulgence in the various restaurants available in our All-Inclusive resort package, heading to the sister resort The Royal Islander located near the south end of the Hotel Zone, for a trip to their in-house restaurant, El Conquistador. Much like our visit to Captain’s Cove a few nights before, El Conquistador was a departure from the local Yucatecan places, offering a classic steakhouse experience, with a good wine list, white linens, and a wide variety of steak dishes.

While the majority of our Cancún visit was spent either touring around the Hotel Zone or taking excursions out of town (to Puerto Morelos for snorkeling, and Chichén Itzá to see the archaeological site), Cancún also has a lot of great restaurant outside of the Hotel Zone. Our hosts Geoff has been vacationing in Cancún pretty much as long as modern Cancún has been in existence, and he has a favorite restaurant that he always likes to visit over on the mainland in downtown Cancún: La Habichuela (“The String Bean”). On our second night in town, we packed into a cab and headed over to check them out.

For the last few years, our friends Geoff and Kristy had invited us to come down in the Spring and check out their villa at Royal Cancun Resort (aka “VCI”, Vacation Club International, one of the oldest resorts in Cancún ), and check out many of the sights and restaurants of the greater Cancún area. After two years of pandemic-related delays, we finally managed to get everything worked out to join them for a week. Royal Cancun Resort offers a pretty good deal on an all-inclusive package for your stay, with drinks and food at any of their resorts and restaurants included (sometimes with a few modest surcharges). They’ve got a pretty good arsenal of restaurants available, including several Mexican, Italian, steakhouse, and seafood options. For our first night on the town, we hopped a cab to the other end of the hotel zone, checking out Captain’s Cove, one of the seafood restaurants that was part of the all-inclusive options.