Anguilla: Cafe Mediterraneo at CuisinArt (April 2016)

My spouse and I dined at Café Mediterraneo at Cuisinart Resort on three mornings of our 4-night stay at the resort in late April 2016. (We dined on the terrace of our suite on our last morning.) Café Med is open for breakfast and lunch daily.

Café Med is located at the center of the resort, and it enjoys a poolside view. Tables are arranged under a white tensioned awning, with sides that staff can roll down in inclement weather (they are also rolled down overnight, after the tables are set for the next morning’s breakfast and the staff goes home). Tables are royal blue wrought iron, which are heavy so they are less likely to blow away in strong winds. Chair cushions are yellow, in keeping with the blue-and-yellow color scheme that is present throughout the public spaces and the accommodations of the hotel. Overhead fans keep the air circulating in the open-air Café Med. An old restored rowboat called the “Miss Med” is positioned outside the restaurant and provides a nice photo op. Because all room packages include complimentary daily breakfast, the hotel can accurately predict how many customers to expect for breakfast; it seems that the staff sets just the right number of tables with exactly the right configurations and number of places the evening before.

For packages that include continental breakfast, guests help themselves from buffet tables set up beneath the center of the awning. Wait staff delivers coffee and tea, however. You can also order the meat-and-cheese plate from the wait staff, although you must know to ask for it – the restaurant does not advertise that it comes complimentary with the buffet. Even when we did order it along with our coffee, we always had to remind the waiter/waitress before we received it. (The plate contained two different kinds of cheeses and two kinds of meat, with two slices of each item.) The buffet items are set up on three tables: one table contains cold juices (two kinds) and ice water. A second table contains various pastries (we loved the johnnycakes and the little French crown rolls [possibly called a kouign-amann], as well as the banana bread; also included were croissants, pan au chocolat, mini muffins, carrot bread) as well as sliced tomatoes and cucumbers grown in the resort’s hydroponic garden, yogurt, granola, tiny boxes of pre-packaged American cereal, and milk. The third table held fresh-cut fruit (six different varieties, including orange, grapefruit, cantaloupe, honeydew, and pineapple) and whole fruits (like bananas, apples, and oranges). The restaurant serves the cut fruits in ceramic tagines, so you must remove the cover to make your selections; however, there is nowhere to place the cover while you are balance your plate while trying to use a utensil to serve yourself. (There are some glass vases/sleeves on this same table that occupy valuable space; if the hotel moved these decorative objects elsewhere, it would make the fruit table much more user-friendly.)

Service at Café Med was appalling, which is difficult because it is a buffet and there is not much for the wait staff to do other than bring hot beverages, non-complimentary menu items (like eggs, omelets, waffles and pancakes priced at about $20 each, and smoothies priced around $10 each), and clear dirty dishes. The male workers tried to be personable, but the women working the breakfast at Café Med displayed some of the most unfriendly, unsmiling faces that we encountered during our 9-day trip to the Caribbean. The women truly made breakfast unpleasant with their sour expressions. We had difficulty receiving the meat and cheese plate every time that we ordered it, having to re-order it a second, third, and fourth time on some days.

We expected great food and service from the Cuisinart resort, and our breakfasts at Café Med did not deliver. (However, our breakfasts at Café Med provided a sharp contrast to our phenomenal dinner at Tokyo Bay on our last evening, which was exceptionally good in every way; see our separate review.)







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