Dreams Tulum had a large buffet that was open every day for breakfast and lunch, and a number of specialty restaurants for dinner. What we LOVED is that we didn't need to make reservations in advance to eat at any of the restaurants. You simply showed up, and they seated you. If they were full, they gave you a buzzer like you'd get a TGI Friday's and you went to the bar for a drink while you waited. We only had to wait once and it was for about 20 minutes.
They really tried hard when it came to the presentation of the food. Everything was super cute.
Mexican salad (above), and garden salad (below)
But even though it looked awesome, the food - in general - wasn't that great. We've been to all-inclusives before. We knew what to expect. And yet we were still disappointed.
All week we kept comparing the food (and the experience in general) to our honeymoon two years ago in Jamaica. When we were in Jamaica, the restaurants there didn't really seem to try very hard at all, but in the end they actually did a pretty good job and the food was good. Their food focused more on fish, beans, rice, and vegetables, and less on meat, since the cow and other animals are actually pretty sickly looking down in Jamaica. At Dreams, they tried really hard, and had tons of meat options that would never ever have been available in Jamaica, but it was underwhelming, and the meat was usually either chewy or tough.
This pork dinner was the best meal of the week
I did eat a lot of Mexican food from the buffet, including this beauty of a plate on our last full day there.
I even ate guacamole for breakfast a couple of days that week, which - for me - is nearly heaven.
So, here are my reviews of the restaurants. And in case anyone ever stumbles upon this post while doing research about this resort, I'll list out all of the restaurants' names. Here we go...
El Patio
The Mexican restaurant - My least favorite place for dinner. Portions were incredibly small and didn't seem like "mexican" food at all. Lunch was better (really enjoyed the fajitas), but the menu was really small. The Mexican salad picture above was from El Patio, and it was my favorite salad of the week.
Portofino
The Italian restaurant - Really great ambiance, and the dining room is huge so they can seat a lot of people. The pasta's were good, but the chicken was incredibly chewy and thus not very good.
Bordeaux
The French restaurant - Definitely my favorite of all of the restaurants. Both of our meals (pork loin and duck) were great and the bread here was super tasty. We should have gone here twice instead trying all of the restaurants once each.
The duck dish from Bordeaux
Sea Side Grill
The steak house - Open air restaurant, and their kitchen opens up to the seating area, so steaky smelling smoke was blowing in our direction the entire time we were sitting there. I ordered filet mignon and while I appreciated their effort, like so many other meats, it was really chewy. There was a cat that visited the patrons of this restaurant, and believe it or not, that was my favorite part.
That's the Sea Side Grill in the background
Himitsu
The Japanese restaurant - The thing that really got me with all of these specialty restaurants, is that they weren't really "specialty" at all. Most of them served variations of the same meats - chicken, port, steak, fish, or shrimp. I got an Asian beef dish that tasted like beef stew. It was ok, but some of the meat was really tough. DH got the pork and hated it because it was so tough.
At least I looked cute that night, right?
Gohan
The sushi restaurant - We're not big sushi fans, so we skipped this one.
World Cafe
This is the buffet restaurant, which is generally also open for dinner. I would highly recommend their Mexican fiesta night if you're into Mexican food - I am, and ate a full meal here even though we had already had an enormous dinner at one of the other restaurants. That's the nice thing about this place - they're open until 10:30 p.m. So if you didn't love your dinner, you can go here for a second meal or even just dessert.
We also took advantage of the room service a few times, although the menu was relatively small and the food was pretty much the same quality as you would get at the restaurants.
DH's favorite meal from room service?
This one.
That's right - 2 plates of french fries. Don't worry, the guy who delivered it made fun of him for it.
The final grade:
On food, I'm only going to give them a C. It was just average, and didn't really above and beyond enough to earn anything higher.
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