La cueva de la cherna — Restaurant in Isla Mujeres

LUNCH REVIEW

My family and I were staying at a hotel nearby and we walked by this cute, pink restaurant every time we left the hotel. It looks like someone’s kitchen where they set up a restaurant so the authenticity factor was high. I was rooting for this place to have delicious, authentic, homemade Mexican tacos because it’s just one of those hole in the wall places. Unfortunately, I was mostly disappointed.

The good thing here is that the tacos are really inexpensive, around $1 USD each, so you should have no qualms ordering many. We went with a variety of chicken, beef, fish, and shrimp. When the tacos come, it’s literally just meat and tortilla. Then you go into the restaurant to load it up with all the fixins’, like pico de Gallo, lettuce, other salsa. Unfortunately, when we went, most of the fixings containers were near empty or empty so there wasn’t much to put on the tacos. This would have been perfectly fine with high-quality, well-cooked meat but the chicken and steak were dry. The fish and shrimp were fine but not the best we found on the island. Perhaps it would be better if we had more fixings available but who knows how often they are refilled.

Despite how cute and affordable it is, I don’t think I...

Food: pretty good. The food itself can be kind of bland but there is a toppings bar that you should definitely utilize. You can beef up your dish with extra rice, cucumbers, cactus, and various salsas. I had the vegetarian, shrimp, and fish tacos. Of the three the best was definitely the fish, it had good flavor and was slightly breaded/fried which gave a nice crunch. The shrimp were overwhelmed by any other flavor in the plate and the vegetables were ok. We also had the shrimp quesadilla which was met with a thumbs up and the chorizo burrito which was lacking both rice and some flavor. You should really go here for the guac though! At $75 per container it’s a steal and so so fresh! We ordered 2 and will probably be ordering more as snacks the rest of our trip.

Service/ambience: the service is relatively slow, mainly because there is 1 server and 2 cooks for the entire restaurant. You can sit outside close to the street or inside where it’s pretty toasty. If you have the option, I would take your food to go. It worked out well for us!

Overall, definitely going back for the guac and fish tacos but probably not anything else...

Absolutely appalling tacos. I ordered one chicken taco, one steak taco, and one fish taco. The chicken looks, tastes, and smells like it is from a can, and actually has the consistency of tuna fish. The steak consisted of the angriest 1cm x 1cm brown cubes that I had ever had the displeasure of encountering. The fish looks and tastes of minced fish sticks, oily enough to set even the most ferrous of guts a-rollin. All three of the tacos were wholly unseasoned and undressed for the occasion. In lieu of flavor, the tacos arrive with the questionable meat sitting miserably atop the lukewarm tortillas with a side plate of 4 ramikens of the following: Pico bland enough to elicit snores, guacamole salsa that tasted like the scent of an avocado from two towns away, hot salsa that sucker punches you in the mouth then runs off with all the flavor, and pickled cactus that thankfully added an echo of acidity. Truly heinous to find tacos of this...