Earlier this week, I went to dinner with 2 of my girlfriends. We decided to try D’Stefano’s, an Italian restaurant on Nader Avenue in downtown Cancun. I had heard good things about the restaurant and insisted we have dinner there.

We quickly found the restaurant (located near the Immigration office) and were not at all impressed. It is simply a small house with a “yard” filled with pebbles. Outside, there are about 10 plastic tables and chairs with umbrellas. I am not sure if seating is available inside. We were the only people in the restaurant. That should’ve been our first clue that we were not in for an enjoyable evening. There was no music playing until a couple of minutes after we were seated. The menus are only in Italian and Spanish. This wasn’t a problem for me and my friends, but I would imagine it could be a big problem for many tourists.

We ordered our drinks and, when the drinks were delivered, we ordered our entrees. I decided to have Lasagna. It was only OK. Nothing spectacular, by any means. One of my friends ordered Spaghetti Carbonara. Again, nothing spectacular. She also ordered a salad of mozzarella cheese and tomatoes (I forget the name of this salad, but it is a common dish in Italian restaurants) and the tomatoes weren’t fully ripe. My other friend got some concoction of salmon and pasta with a cream sauce. It smelled really “fishy” to me so I didn’t try it, but she enjoyed it.

The portions were large, but we each only ate about 1/4 of our meals. We got them boxed up, but soon realized we wouldn’t eat the leftovers. If it wasn’t good enough to eat the first time around, why bother eating it later?!

We paid our bill and high-tailed it over to Club Sandwich Cafe for coffee and dessert. I had the delicious Apple Strudel, one of the girls had the equally magnificent Carrot Cake, and my other friend had decaf coffee. You may not think that was much of a treat for her…plain ol’ decaf…but it was. You see, decaf coffee is hard to come by. Sure, restaurants might SAY they serve it, but it’s not really decaf if it keeps you awake all night, is it??

So, to sum it up, we were very disappointed in D’Stefano’s, but I can’t find enough good things to say about Club Sandwich Cafe.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 2:54 pm and is filed under General Blog Entries, Restaurant Reviews. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. We reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.