El Mesón del Marqués — Restaurant in Valladolid

What a shame. A beautiful courtyard and tremendous Yucatecan dishes... But our server, a sweet gentlemen until that point, tried to scam us at the end of the meal. :(

We landed in Cancun and we're making our way to Merida, so decided to stop in Valladolid for lunch. Ended up at El Meson del Marques based on the number of quality reviews.

We ordered staple dishes like sopa de lima and cochinita pibil and I ordered a beer. The server asked how everything was, and I told him that we literally just arrived a couple hours earlier and this meal was everything we needed it to be and more. We were very gracious. Then we asked for the check.

He brought a check for a different table that was 4-5 times more than our actual meal. He was kind and I thought nothing of it. Simple mistake, so I flagged him down to tell him that there has been a mistake. He exchanged the ticket with the right one, we paid, left, and all was good.

And then it struck me how strange the sequence of events were. I told him that I think there has been a mistake and he immediately - without ever looking at the check - agreed that he gave us the wrong table's check. He was highly apologetic telling us that there was a mixup at the register as he took our bill. But, importantly, he did all this while he was taking our bill, not after confirming that the bill was, in fact, erroneous. In other words, he knew the check was wrong all along and was willing to risk us paying the wrong check instead of saying something.

A real shameful attempt to exploit the good nature of newly arrived visitors for an otherwise exceptional restaurant. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I'm not saying don't go there. But I am saying to be careful....

It was our last night in Valladolid and also my birthday and we decided to treat ourselves so came to this restaurant. We wanted to be seated on the rooftop, but we were told that on the rooftop it's a different kind of menu, so we decided to stay downstairs. We still wanted to see the rooftop though so asked if it's possible to go up and see it before we are seated. Our waitress was a bit hesitant, but finally told us that her colleague will show us the rooftop. So we went to her collegue, but she said we cannot go up there, eventhough her colleague told us so. She did not give any reason, just told us no. I regret not walking out of there straight away. Disappointed, we sat to the table downstairs. It took about 10-15 minutes to take our order. I've ordered a soup and my partner ordered the Plato Tipico. They brought us the soup about 30 mins later, and about 15mins later the other meal that we ordered. Not sure why it was so difficult to serve the food we ordered at the same time. I wanted to wait for my partner's meal to arrive so that we could eat together, but by that time my soup would've gone cold. Anyway, the food tasted okay, but nothing special. Then we had to wait another 10 mins to be able to pay the bill. The restaurant wasn't even full, so they were not even that busy. It was a very bad experience, we were really unhappy with the service and our night and my...

Food was good, the atmosphere was cute and the bartender, Julian, was fantastic. However, the service was beyond subpar. Even though there was a list, the hostess skipped over us for a table as we watched multiple groups that came in after us get seated first. We then watched as a table that was sat after us order and receive their drinks/appetizers before someone even waited on us. To make matters worse, we were forced to ask a random person to take our order. The only time someone returned to our table was to drop off our food. We were never asked about drink refills (hubbie went to the bar on his own for julian as his drinks/service went above and beyond), to check how are food was or even bring the check. After my husband went and spoke with the manager, the manager promptly blew us off and found our waitress to deal with us (which no good manager would ever do). Overall, I would never go back to this restaurant and strongly recommend you not visit unless you have about 3 hours to spend and can deal with awful service. We love the town of Vallalodid but this experience ruined our day. If it weren’t for Julian and his exceptional drinks and service, the entire experience would have been a nightmare. As you’ll see from my other reviews, I only ever have good things to say but hopefully that emphasizes how terrible of an...