Puerto Morelos Mexico, Tulum..etc

Puerto Morelos is a small little fishing village that isn't all that touristy, halfway between cancun and playa del carmen. nice place to visit.

Suckling pig (cochinita pibil apparently) tacos from El Tios in Puerto Morelos... Had these for breakfast actually... Very good... Marinade was vinegar based and you could really taste it. Didn't feel so good not too long after though



John Gray's Kitchen ... if you visit Puerto Morelos or even Playa del Carmen, go to John Gray's Kitchen (his location in Playa is just "John's Kitchen") for a nicer dinner. (or apparently, even people visiting Cancun regularly drive to Puerto Morelos to go here). In a setting of a typically run-down-looking Mexican street sits John Gray's Kitchen, a nicely painted house he built specifically to house the restaurant. Prior to opening his own restaurant, John Gray was the head chef for several different Ritz-Carlton locations, moving to the area as they expanded into it. after leaving one of the mexican locations he later decided he wanted to move there and open this place (his playa del carmen place came later). I didn't take any pictures... For dinner I started with a Tuna prepared in what he described has a Hawaiin preperation on top of an asian salad ... SO started with mushroom soup with truffle oil. Main course for me was a flank steak of sorts (he described it as being not marinated, but instead cooked for a very long time and charred on the ends, then he cuts off the charred outside to reveal the inside). The other half had a local deep channel fresh fish that was somewhat steaky with a Spanish (different than Mexican!) chorizo vinegerette (very very good).. Sides involved Yucas and other veggies.. The Yucas are very starchy. IIRC, he said cooking them is always an experiment in progress, but he basically braises them in white wine for a long time. Dessert was a chocolate torte topped with figs. He was good to talk to, and helpful for getting the inside scoop of various local unknowns. Prices were very reasonable, I think our meal, drinks (including wine and several cocktails) came out to be about the equivalent of $100. It was a bit of a slow night there, so we sat at the bar after and had drinks and talked to him and his crew until after closing.

In Tulum we were in a hurry and couldn't find the place we were looking for (actually, I think we found it but it had closed). so we ended up at a place called Charlies, which I'm sure is touristy but looked like we could get reliable food..
I had a so so margarita, which are suprisingly hard to find in Mexico (though Tequlia Y Fresca is an easy thing to order if you want a quick substitute, and is very very good).


lunch@charlie's in Tulum:
chicken mole enchiladas ... they were good, a little hot and heavy perhaps for such a hot day though.

fish tacos (the brown stuff is actually from the other plate...)


guacamole/chips were excellent...

...the house cat who eagerly awaited leftover food...


...back in Puerto Morelos. Some places have fish tacos, Puerto Morelos is big on shrimp tacos. At the Le Marlin Bleu, this is their specialty.



... very good. a little skimpy on the shrimp (only 2 per taco). 3 tacos was about $4 US. your choice of a corn or flour tortilla... served with a strip of red pepper and avocado, and some sort of mayo. 3 sauces served on the side, watch out for the dark brown one, its not all that spicey but it will come back to haunt you! For drinks we both had limonade (which is not to be confused with Lemonade... its lime). Freshly made, delicious and refreshing. The owner is a French man who moved to Mexico City over 20 years ago, then he moved to Puerto Morelos and opened Le Marlin Bleu over 15 years ago.... we went back at night to chit chat with him, in English, Spanish, and French...


...Breakfast at Ojo de Agua in Puerto Morelos.. there were cops there eating, so how bad can it be right? We both had chilaquiles, which is basically leftover tortillas topped with meat and cheese and onions and baked. it was so so. upon leaving, we ran in to the guy running the dive shop (who is from Houston), who said the restaurant wasn't that great but the hotel was a good place to stay. (where was he before we sat down? )...

...lunch at some road side place near the road to Puerto Morelos. The sign said Tacos Y Tortas...so tortas it was. The only choice for meat was Carne Asade.... they were good.. It was one of the sketchier looking places we ate at, so I was a little worried, but it was very delicious. (Also, it seems that in mexico they don't refrigerate open Mayo always...??? this worried me a bit but I survived it)



... Dinner at Pelicana in Puerto Morelos.... mostly seafood choices, we started with ceviche. Very good... For entrees we both ordered fish (which was a white fish of some sort...). There were a number of ways to get fish prepared, we got one in a garlic butter and another ala Veracruz (a tomato based sauce). Both were excellent, but the garlic butter one was just marvelous. and it was very cheap (equiv $8 or something).... Probably one of the better inexpensive seafood places in town.

...Dinner (& spa) at La Ceiba resort in Puerto Morelos... this was one of those nights where the appetite just wasn't there, but somehow I found the initiative to order a whole fish (grouper) that was salt encrusted and baked in a wood fire oven. The waitor takes it out of the salt crust tableside and plates it... (I believe this is more French than Mexican). It was for 2 people to eat, too. Very very good, couldn't eat the whole thing though.

overall the food we had was good, I don't think there was anything we didn't like... I think the sun and heat got to us and there were two nights where we just didn't even feel like eating (unfortunately..). I wanted to try rock lobster, which is a local specialty. but when it came down to dinner time it just seemed like too much food, which is very unusual for me! closest I got to rock lobster was seeing a few while snorkeling at the reef in Puerto Morelos.

dddane,

Nice post and pictures -- I'm envious of your trip!

Is the pork in the top picture poc chuc?

Amata

p.s. cute cat!

After quickly googling around, it looks like suckling pig in this prep is called cochinita pibil in Mexico (of Mayan / Yucatan origins). i know it was suckling pig because the guy didn't speak any english and he described a baby pig to us gringos..

googling for poc chuc ...i couldn't find references to them using suckling pig as the pork in it.. though they do serve poc chuc with pickled red onions too.. the diff seems to be in how its cooked ... cochinita pibil slow cooked and poc chuc grilled

a few references to cochinita pibil:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochinita_pibil

http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/recipe_cochinitapibil.htm

...it uses a very acidic vinegar based marinade. and slow cooked on the stove.

poc chuc on the other hand apparently uses a very acidic marinade of mostly sour orange juice http://www.recipeland.com/recipe/32449/ & http://www.recipezaar.com/164872 ..... and the pork is grilled

Another reference to cochinita pibil:

http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=22576#22576

Actually I don't use the actual name, but that's what the pork in the fourth photo was.

I've never seen the words "poc chuc" on a menu down there, but cochinita pibil is all over, as it is the pork dish of the Yucatan. (Though I certainly wouldn't be surprised by the availability of anything, given that people from all over Mexico move to the Cancun/Yucatan region for work.)

Very nice post and pictures.

dddane wrote:a few references to cochinita pibil:
...
...it uses a very acidic vinegar based marinade. and slow cooked on the stove.

poc chuc on the other hand apparently uses a very acidic marinade of mostly sour orange juice http://www.recipeland.com/recipe/32449/ & http://www.recipezaar.com/164872 ..... and the pork is grilled

My understanding was that a marinade for any pibil, pork or chicken, traditionally involves sour orange juice rather than vinegar, and that vinegar is used when narranjas agria are not available.

Bayless' pibil recipes call for sour orange juice and no vinegar (although Dianna Kennedy oddly calls for no marinade at all in her pibil), and Carlos at Sol de Mexico uses primarily sour orange juice in his cochinita pibil.

My gut feeling is that vinegar is a north-of-the-border variation, but I could be mistaken.

Best,
Michael

eatchicago wrote:My gut feeling is that vinegar is a north-of-the-border variation, but I could be mistaken.

could be that no vinegar should be in it... its possible (probable even?) the vinegary taste was coming from the pickled onions on top.

we were a bit naive to the sour orange thing when there.... we bought some oranges at the grocery store (which were more green/yellow than orange) and when we attempted to eat them they were bitter and sour. i guess this is what people use them for!

I notice that both of those sites refer to poc chuc as a Yucatan or Mayan dish. Maybe it exists in higher end restaurants (like Yaxche here); from the stands or even the smaller comidas, you see either a big roasted hunk of pork or a stew or salsa with chunks of pork in it, not a whole "pork steak."

Whenever I had cochinita pibil it definitely had an orangey taste. The vinegar only came when you dressed it with the onions in red wine vinegar.

Sour orange, not vinegar, is the acid used for the marinade in both dishes under discussion.

Poc chuc is most definitely a dish of the Mayan / Yucatan repertoire, not an import from elsewhere, and the meat (marinaded pork cooked on grill or in skillet) is, indeed, often served in tacos, often accompanied by black beans.

Antonius

And (to add to Antonius's comments), the pibil dishes are traditionally cooked in a pit (Yucatec Maya pib), with the meat wrapped in a banana leaf. (Originally turkey and venison, of course; now chicken and pork).

Mike, I'm surprised you didn't see listings for poc chuc -- I thought it had become a bit of a cliche on Yucatec menus these days. Maybe more in the inland portions of the region...


Anyway, I wish more Yucatecos would move to Chicago and cook some pork up here!

Well, you just wouldn't see a whole pork steak being served, certainly not at a stand serving tacos where they tend to use a big hunk of roasted pork of one kind or another:



and normally even at a comida where you tend to get a stew with a few chunks in it. I don't remember what retail prices for meat were like but when you're talking a dollar for a taco or about $3.50 per person for a complete lunch at a comida, surely a pork steak is out of that range and, being grilled, wouldn't keep well for dishing up from a cart. Though since the marinades are so similar, by the time you hack it up and put it on a taco, it may not look or taste all that much different from cochinita pibil (and would be affordable if you're only using a small bit), so who knows.

Incidentally, I read about John Gray's place in Tulum in Conde Nast Traveler... right after we got back last time. Glad to hear that someone tried it!

P.S. This is a lousy picture, but it comes in sequence right after the picture of the cochinita pibil and shows how it's typically sold from the carts-- a big hunk of meat sitting in its own juices, chopped to order:



There were half a dozen of these carts, selling this each morning, in the main square (next to Mickey D's) alone, and others scattered around town.

It might not be daily fare for the poorest but poc chuc is not fancy, high end food: it is thinly sliced, marinated pork which is grilled and commonly eaten in tacos. An English language Google search seems to give the impression that this dish involves "pork steaks"; that is, I think a little misleading: Good cuts (lomo) are often indicated in recipes, other recipes are not so specific, at least of the many Spanish language ones I've perused, both from googling and from the various books in our relatively extensive Spanish language biblioteca culinaria. One notes too that Bayless in one of his books refers to the dish as "ubiquitous" with regard to the Yucatan and speaks of it as supremely common and humble fare.

I don't question the observation that poc chuc is not common is some places but I just want to say that there seems to be a number of good reasons to think that it is a reasonably widely consumed dish in the region: carne de puerco asada a la Yucateca...

Yeah, they must be making it somewhere, but when I looked at the pictures again of places where they grilled stuff it was always beef, the only pork (if any) was pastor:



But there's a lot of the Yucatan besides the heavily touristed corridor of the Mayan Riviera, which is surely atypical in so many ways (I doubt there's much sushi or Haagen-Dazs in the interior, either), so it must be ubiquitous in some other part....

(Hey, I want to go back now! Thanks, dddane, for provoking a trip down photographic memory lane...)

I visited Tulum last month... detailed review here w/ pics:

http://www.tulum.info/showthread.php?t=1909

A couple standouts - on the beach, and on the pricey side was Hechizo. A spectacularly located restaurant run by a former ritz-carlton chef was one of my favorite dining experiences - ever. The food was great, but you could get an equal meal at any number of chicago restaurants, but situated right on the beach, overlooking the Caribbean, with gracious service in a fantastic building... it was just a special place.

In town there were great grilled chicken joints and a few taquerias - Pollo Branco and Taqueria Diaz were standouts.

We just got back from a very enjoyable week in Tulum (about a two hour drive south from Cancun). I would definitely return to Tulum. While it’s certainly not a top food destination in Mexico, we found some very nice spots.

Favorite local spots:

Carts
Taqueria Honorio: Cochinita pibil, lechon, carne asada tacos and tortas. Delicious and cheap food cart with a few stools parked on Satelite Sur just south of the main Avenida Tulum.

Another cart—Red with 2 red tables and chairs (not sure of the name but the handwritten sign starts with Posol Bien Frio). I believe this is at the corner of Beta and Venus right next to a park. Sorry about the vague directions but Tulum’s not that big—it’s worth wandering around to find this place. The woman who runs it it very friendly and makes all kinds of good masa creations while you wait (panuchos—thick tortilla with beans and your choice of meat, salbutes-fried stuffed masa topped with tomatoes and empanadas). Washed down with Mexican Coke in a bottle—heaven.
The pic is from a cheese empanada breakfast—topped with chopped red onion, habanero, lime juice salsa.

Sit down restaurant:
Los Pepes: at the corner of Osiris and Polar
Inexpensive, fresh seafood, patronized by locals. Nice selection of beer for about $1.60 each (a small additional charge for chelada—salt rimmed glass with lime or michelada—the latter plus Worchester, maggi seasoning, hot sauce in the glass). Though the restaurant is indoors, the nice big windows and ceiling fans allow the perfect amount of sun with a nice breeze. This place was recommended by other Americans who have eaten here on each of their three trips to Tulum and don’t like to eat dinner ‘surrounded by Americans’ while on vacation. We wished we’d found this place sooner. We were there the day after Christmas and the selection of dishes was less because the owner wasn’t satisfied with the quality of seafood available for purchase. We had fish dishes (grouper, I believe) which were superbly fresh—a fish brochette and fish filet with mojo de ajo.


Beer/drink list (a little fuzzy)








Enjoying happy hour at Posada Luna Mar hotel:

I'll post on some of the more upscale spots we liked later...

Forgot to add above, we enjoyed a little roast chicken place on the 'main road' in Coba. We picked this place because it didn't look touristy, 4 cops were eating there and it's right next to the tortilla 'factory' and we watched them ferrying fresh tortillas to the restaurant every few minutes. I believe two plates like the one picture below with plenty of fresh tortillas and Mexican coke ran us about $10.



More upscale places we liked:

Tabano: Zona Hotelera Tulum
We loved this place! Tabano apparently means horsefly. Fantastic setting in a jungle-y garden with candles. They have a very inventive menu and very warm, friendly service. They change up the menu frequently and have everything listed on a chalkboard. They also have the best wine list we found in Tulum (o.k, not saying much, but we enjoyed their wines by the glass). Unfortunately, due to the dim lighting, I couldn't get many pictures here. Highlights of the menu while we were there: jalapenos rellenos (riff on chiles rellenos with a ground chicken stuffing, served on a zucchini, black bean salad), a terrific baked fish dish with beer, orange, tomatoes and olives, great fish tacos.

Pear salad with pecans and dried fruit, Jalapenos rellenos and Shrimp with habanero sauce at Tabano



Posada Margarita: Zona Hotelera Tulum
This place gets great press and is one of the most popular restaurants in Tulum. The proprietor, from Genoa, sits down at your table and explains the day's specials. Every table receives an antipasto tray consisting of house-made breads, veggies. Pastas are made in-house. This place is quite charming, but we thought the execution missed the mark a little. They had a nice Montepulciano by the glass. We had had a linguine with shrimp and lobster dish--the homemade pasta was perfectly cooked but the lobster was a little overdone. The other dish, a fresh shrimp in brandy with tomatoes, featured beautiful fresh shrimp but was a little lacking in flavor. Chocolate mousse was excellent. I'd probably go back if I were in Tulum but this definitely wasn't my favorite of the restaurants we tried. Dinner was about $100 for 2 with two entrees, 4 glasses of wine and 1 dessert. Because of lighting issues, I just got a pic of the antipasti

Posada Margarita antipasti


Que Fresco (restaurant of Zamas)--zona hotelera: Very popular, but, we thought the food was just so-so. However, the setting is fantastic and it's definitely worth a drink and appetizer here. We went for lunch and had guacamole and two types of fish tacos which were slightly fishy. Guac was fine but we had better.
I just got a picture of the setting (the best part of the experience)

Que Fresco


Dolci Sapori: Tulum puebla
This was a shockingly good Italian place run by a charming guy from Sardegna (though the menu didn't highlight food from Sardegna). Pastas and homemade bread were nothing fancy but perfectly executed and reasonably-priced. We were a little skeptical about Italian food in Tulum (which isn't really fair, there seem to be lots of Italian ex-pats around) so we picked 'safe' choices--linguini with pesto and shrimp and penne all'arrabiata. Both were excellent. If you are vacationing in the area and you get sick of Mexican food, I highly recommend this place. Best cappuccino (or coffee for that matter) in Tulum.

Not worth it at all:
Hechizo--far south zona hotelera (almost at the Si'an Kaan biopreserve entrance): Imagine taking a winding path along the coast and coming to a wavy stone wall with a curving path to the beach. After parking, you walk down a stone path lit with candles to the restaurant which features a charming mosaic beneath an aquarium. O.k., but there the poetry ends. Although the setting and the approach were charming, the food was a big disappointment. The dining room has a very institutional feel--too much white and bright fluorescent lighting. We the thought the menu was unimaginative and poorly executed. I don't know if management/kitchen staff has changed but we couldn't just attribute our disappointment to an off night--we weren't that impressed with the menu. We had two appetizers: crab cake in a tomato-based sauce, watermelon and goat cheese salad, two entrees--lobster and gnocchi and citrus marinated tuna over citrus fruit with apple, cilantro and two desserts--chocolate lava cake, banana bread pudding. The appetizers were both a little bland. The watermelon and goat cheese salad had pine nuts (not toasted) which were a little rancid. I like the idea of the salad but I could easily make better at home. The crab cake was pretty ordinary (though I give them credit for it not being to bready). The lobster was the highlight but it wasn't mind-blowing. The tuna was not great quality and didn't have much of a sear. The lava cake was fine but the banana bread 'pudding' was more like a cold jello—really inedible. Service started out great but then our servers disappeared into the black hole. I had to get up from the table to get and pay the check. There were only 3 full tables while we were there. This is a high end restaurant so I felt this was inexcusable. Tab for 2=115 before tip with 3 glasses of wine total.

Hechizo mosaic


Hechizo watermelon salad


Hechizo tuna


Hechizo lobster with gnocchi

thaiobsessed wrote:Forgot to add above, we enjoyed a little roast chicken place on the 'main road' in Coba. We picked this place because it didn't look touristy, 4 cops were eating there and it's right next to the tortilla 'factory' and we watched them ferrying fresh tortillas to the restaurant every few minutes. I believe two plates like the one picture below with plenty of fresh tortillas and Mexican coke ran us about $10.

I’ll be in Tulum next week and plan to do a half-day trip out to Coba (The Wife and I were there in the late 70s, before the main pyramid was excavated, and I’m eager to see what’s been uncovered in the past 30 years). I’ll be relying on a taxi (I think), and I’m looking forward to checking out roadside places.

I'm headed to Tulum at the end of the week - lots of great info in this two year old thread but wanted to bump it to see if there's anything new or anything that should be updated.

Thanks!