Choux Choux Café — Restaurant in Playa del Carmen

This may be the worst restaurant meal I’ve eaten. TLDR: disgusting food, made me ill, and terrible service.

Food: Coffee came about half and hour after we ordered our drinks and was barely warm. We asked for water multiple times and never got any. The food was disgusting once it finally arrived - I ordered the Taconato (one of the “salado” breakfast options - supposed to have tortilla, scrambled eggs, bacon, avocado), my partner ordered a caprese croissant, and we got a fruit + granola bowl to share. Fruit +granola bowl was a small spoonful of granola, the yogurt was runny and kind of warm, had no flavour. I attached a pic of the Taconato. Very small portion size. When ordering, they told my partner there wasn’t enough bacon to add to his croissant, and offered him ham instead. Then they didn’t add ham to his, but still charged us for it. The server didn’t tell us that my dish would not have bacon, and put this ham in it instead. The ham was a flavourless, gross deli meat, worse than subway, the eggs were almost cold and quite sweaty, the avocado had a brown skin over it (probably been sitting back there a long time, or was a reused plate, I don’t know). Eggs are the simplest thing to cook and somehow these were barely edible. No seasoning on anything. It was actually a challenge to eat this food and although I was hungry I couldn’t finish it. Fast forward today and I’ve got some kind of food poisoning - thanks a lot!

Service: it was just as bad as the food. We didn’t have any menus for about 10-15 minutes, they forgot. Two bigger tables sat down after us. The server looked at us and then served the bigger group first. They got drinks and food before we even got coffee. Didn’t bring water after we asked a few times (I think we asked 3 different people?) No one came around during the meal, so we just tried to eat so that we could leave as quickly as possible. Charged us for that extra side that my partner didn’t receive. The cashier was very rude. Terrible service all around.

Had plenty of great food in this city but like I said, this was the worst restaurant meal I think I’ve ever had. Save yourself the trouble, go eat...

This place has been a longtime favourite for me when I'm in PDC, along with their smaller location on 5th. The food is great and the atmosphere is inviting. Depending on how busy they are, the service ranges from excellent to mediocre, but again, the food and atmosphere make up for it.

I've just arrived in Playa and it was my first stop on my first morning back. All was well until it was time to pay my bill, when my VISA was run through twice and I was told that the terminals weren't working and the transactions were unsuccessful. Rather than try again, I paid cash.

Later in the day, I noticed that the two "unsuccessful" transactions were showing up in my online VISA statement. I went back and spoke with the person who had processed them, who asked me to come back in the morning to speak with his manager, assuring me it would be resolved. The next morning, when I asked for the manager I was met with a "Why?" After explaining the situation, I was told they wouldn't be able to process the refund until later in the day and to come back in the afternoon.

Now on my third visit to resolve this, I asked the same person who had processed my transaction the day before and knew about the issue if the manager was around. His response was, "No, why?" I explained the issue once again and miraculously, the manager appeared. Overall, he handled it well. Apologizing, he quickly refunded the money, though he couldn't process a refund on the card.

Here's what I have trouble with: I wasn't provided a printout for either of the "unsuccessful" transactions. It took THREE trips back to receive a refund. Two requests to speak with the manager were met with suspicion and on one occasion a downright lie. A more appropriate response would have been, "Can I ask what it's about, so I can find the right person to help?"

Will I be back? Maybe, but it won't be soon. In the meantime, I hope they put some thought into how...

We visited this place for breakfast with friends we had just picked up from an early morning flight after reading the great reviews and seeing many great pictures. However, we are very disappointed by our experience. Our server was very unfriendly. He came over and plopped down silverware and napkins, and walked away without saying a word. We waited forever to receive menus. My husband finally got up to go up to the front to ask for menus, and while he was doing that, the server came back and asked if we were ready to order. We told him we hadn’t received menus yet, and he told us we needed to scan the code on the side of napkin holder to see the menus on our phones. It would’ve been helpful if he had mentioned that when he set it down. (at this point we are well past the pandemic time where every restaurant was doing that all the time most restaurants are handing out menus these days so we weren’t expecting the scan codes. Later, I saw another server greeting a different table and he clearly explained how to look at the menu.) When they delivered our food two of the four entrées were wrong. My husband sent his back because it was completely wrong. Mine was at least a bowl even though I had asked for no granola and it looked like it was a different ball from the one I had ordered. I decided to eat it anyway because it had taken so long to receive it. About 10 bites into my bowl they came over and took it back from me because they realized it was the wrong bowl and then realized I was already eating it, so set it back down in front of me and walked away. All this without saying a word. The place seems to be very popular. There was a line waiting when we left, however, it was a terrible first impression for our visitors, and we probably...