MYCELIUM café & restaurant — Restaurant in Veintisiete de Abril

This was the best food we had in Costa Rica.

Incredibly light vibe among the staff. Impeccably appointed restaurant with a barefoot vibe and immaculate open kitchen.

Don’t hurry this experience as there’s a single chef and a sous chef, but the mixologist is charming as can be and is very skilled at his craft as well. The staff is super friendly and engaging and clearly loves what they do.

You’ll want reservations but bar spots available if you get there at opening or shortly after (in early May we visited on a Saturday and got the second spot at the bar 10 mins after opening).

The desserts are supremely innovative and out of this world. Had a gelato the likes of which I’ve never had before, and some pralines done without any sugar allegedly (date sweetened and .. wow) that are to die for.

Now there are some nits though:

If you have a soy allergy you’re gonna have problems. The only thing I didn’t like there is when one server responded to a party members soy sensitivity, telling me and my actually-Vietnamese wife that “we do Asian food so there’s going to be soy. It’s how we get the flavor.”

This gave me a vibe that the owners (Czech I believe?) might be flirting with cultural appropriation feeling they can both be expertly authentic in traditional Asian cooking and improve upon it.

The chef and owner have tremendous skill (check out the cookbook… it is amazingly produced, visually gorgeous and detailed beyond belief) and gourmet execution no doubt, and this is still the best restaurant in the area we visited…. but if you’re looking for authentic Vietnamese flavors it’s not really gonna hit the mark for you. Just know that going in.

Allergy sufferers: they do well with moderate gluten and dairy allergies however if you are very sensitive to cross-contamination, you’ll see the chef handling bread of other dishes interleaved next to yours. This won’t be your place if you’re that sensitive.

This is a gastronomic food experience I highly recommend. But if you are rolling with someone who has done a fair amount of Vietnamese cooking themselves… you may leave with a bit of a furrowed brow over the proud zeal-of-a-convert that tinges the effusive, friendly, chill, proud high-achieving vibe that oozes from this...

I can not even begin to explain the incredible experience my family and I had at Mycelium. Even before we ate at this wonderful restaurant, we had such a warm welcome and were helped immensely by Robi. My family and I arrived in Los Pargos, Costa Rica late at night from Toronto, Canada. Everyone was exhausted and kids were crying like no tomorrow as we just could not find our AirBnb.

After over 2 hours of driving around in the pitch black, we saw that Mycelium was open and asked for directions - a minute later and we were following Robi on his motorbike to our AirBnb. He led us all the way to our place and made sure we got in OK. We were all so happy to be at our home for the next few days.

We read Myceliums' Google reviews prior to leaving Canada and had already planned to dine there, but the kindness we received and seeing how beautiful the restaurant was just solidified it. On our last day, we stopped by for brunch and were once again, so well-received with kindness and such great hospitality that it's been a month now and we're still talking about it.

Our server was extremely friendly and knowledgeable in all their amazing dishes. He was funny and engaged everyone at the table. He described all the dishes with great detail and spoke so very highly of all his colleagues.

On to the food... My family of 7 all ordered different meals and every single one was 10/10, in all aspects (food, presentation, quantity and quality). All the ingredients were as fresh as they could be. I'm 43 and it felt like I had never had fruit until I tasted their smoothies and bowls.

The ambiance at night was beautiful, the pathways to the restaurant were lit up and there was awesome music playing. At brunch, we noticed the swings inside the restaurant which my son loved (along with Robi, who is great with kids btw). Over all, I can't recommend this place enough. You just gotta go. Everything was over the top! Thanks everyone and keep up...

If it was just for food, 5* hands down. Food was totally over the top, all the flavors, etc... Just be careful "how you eat it". For example I got some fish which was topped by "something". It was totally great on it's own, but it had the sauce, that again, was over the top, but if you used it with fish, it killed all the flavor from the fish... but mix it with provided rice? Absolutely perfect :) It was the same with mushroom food my gf had :) So why just 4*? Ironically, if it was just "regular" restaurant, it'd be 5... unfortunately, when you come to place like this, from how it looks like (absolutely perfect) to the price of the food, you have high expectations and are keen on details: staff, while being super nice and there being a lot of servers, they seemed kind of lost and chaotic. And one of the servers, I'd bet, was super high... :D restaurant is the nicest one we have seen in CR, but the seating options, where you have just 3 tables for groups and then 1 huge table with 20+ seats where all the rest of the people are seated, does not seem like a good idea to me (and basically everyone I've seen who enetered restaurant after us). I get the idea behind the large table, of "connecting people", but if you want to get a romantic dinner with your significant other, it's just not really great sitting at the corner (and that's the best seat) of that huge table with someone sitting just opposite of you... men's bathroom "needs work"... menu is messy, a) looks terrible (laminated paper) for given restaurant, b) not really well organized, as you cannot differentiate appetizers with mains, except maybe for a small difference in price... desserts (at least one we tried), are "just good"... not saying it's bad, but compared to the appetizer/mains we had, that, once again, were spectacular, it's nothing out of the ordinary.

Update to reply: I don't...