Sunday, February 19, 2012

Oceana

For our first dinner in Cancun, we picked Oceana, the seafood restaurant at the resort. We were looking forward to some healthy seafood dishes after a long day of traveling. Since we were staying at an all-inclusive resort, we could order anything we wanted without caring about prices. That type of freedom was fantastic.

Oceana Restaurant (the next morning)

The meal started with some bread and butter. The rolls were plain and the butter didn't have any special flavoring, so this wasn't really very exciting.


For her appetizer, M ordered the turbante de salmón ahumado y camarón, preparado con pepino, cilantro y lima, perfumado de miel y mostaza (smoked salmon and shrimp turban, prepared with cucumber, cilantro and lime, perfumed with honey and mustard).


The plate consisted of some salad greens, carrots and cucumbers and a piece of smoked salmon wrapped around what M thought would be shrimp based on the menu description. Instead, what was inside the smoked salmon was more like ceviche.


This was a good appetizer. It had the light and clean flavors that M was looking for and the salmon and ceviche tasted really fresh.

A got the bisquet de langosta, perfumada de cognac y pernod (lobster bisque, perfumed with cognac and pernot).


This was a very rich and flavorful soup. A could definitely taste the lobster that was used to flavor the soup even if there really wasn't much actual lobster. It was surprisingly not creamy even though it was a bisque. It seemed much more tomato-based instead of cream-based, and that was really nice.

For the main course, M got the seafood special - mariscada dreams - camarón, pescado, calamar, callo de hacha y mejillón, parrillados con pesto (shrimp, fish, squid, scallops and mussels, grilled with pesto).


From the menu description, we thought this would be a healthy plate of grilled seafood. A little bit of oil from the pesto, but otherwise just simply grilled. If that's what you thought from the description, the picture should be your first indication that you're wrong. The seafood may have been grilled, but it was also drenched in a ton of butter sauce. So. Much. Butter. It was completely overwhelming. On top of that, M asked when ordering to confirm there was no broccoli in the dish, and it showed up with broccoli. If the broccoli were just grilled or steamed, we could move it with no issue, but with all that butter sauce, there was broccoli floating everywhere. All the butter made this a rather disappointing dish, especially after such a clean appetizer. There was also no pesto that we noticed, but that was less of an issue than the butter.

A got the surf and turf - mar y tierra - filete de res y camarones a la parrilla, servido con salsa de pimiento rojo y salsa de oporto (grilled beef fillet and shrimp, served with red pepper and port sauce).


As always, A ordered his filet rare. It came out much closer to medium rare, which for any other steak would have been okay, but this was filet, and that was disappointing. The sauce tasted a lot like the bisque he had just eaten but infused with some butter. He also got some of the same buttery vegetables that M got with her dish. Overall it was a bit disappointing, but certainly more edible than the buttery mess that M got.

We had a nice and relaxing dinner at Oceana, but the food was just okay. We both agreed that our appetizers were better than the entrees. We decided to skip dessert since we were pretty full after dinner.

Blurry photo of us at Oceana

Since our resort had multiple restaurant options, we planned to try different restaurants every night. Oceana was much too buttery for our liking, so we figured that, even with a longer trip, we would most likely not return for dinner. We hoped the other restaurants would be better (and use less butter)!

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