Cayo Caribe Monte Hiedra — Restaurant in San Juan

I was on vacation and I came to the Outlets at Montehiedra with my family. There's a lot of great new additions to this area. While here, we decided to check out Cayo Caribe today and this is my Tell-All-Story.

Cayo Caribe is a Mexican-based restaurant-chain that is popular in Puerto Rico. Some stateside mainlanders will know them as a "mariscos", which means that they focus most of their menu dishes on seafood or "surf & turf" with proteins primarily sourced from the ocean & some beef.

At first glance, Cayo Caribe comes across as a brand-new establishment, that has just opened and is working on the kinks, but they've been around for years. Let me share my experience and explain.

Upon entering, our waitress was kind & helpful. She greeted us and found us group seating pretty quickly. This was one of the pluses for the night.

There was plenty of bar-seating, a few high-tables and smaller tables that worked best for couples. From my experience, even with booth-seating, our table was too crammed for the 4 of us; we were fighting for table-space and had to quickly clear our plating after each meal course in order to make room... not fun.

I recommend that if you plan on coming here with a group, call in advance and have them combine tables to make space.

Now for their service. My biggest gripe with my experience was the lack of communication in the service department, which led to a major inconvenience.

After we got seated by the host, we were given menus and that was that. We sat down conversing & looking over their menu for about 20 minutes. In this time, I went to use the bathroom (which was very clean & well-kept) and returned to the table.

I then waited around and nobody asked us if we even wanted water; not acceptable at all.

The only saving grace is that their menu was filled with so many delicious options, we were occupied choosing what we wanted.

I, literally, had to get up and walk back to the host and tell her "we are ready to order our food whenever you'd like to have us" - this is my nice way of saying "we haven't been helped yet, fix this". She apologized and got us a server.

Jorgé, our server, was the highlight of our night. He was friendly, fast, knowledgeable and diligent. He 'rescued' me from having the worse dining experience of 2024.

I ordered the mariscos sample platter for $19 and it was a great call. With a good portion size, we got a taste of their guava dipping sauce (another shining beacon of happiness) and we enjoyed it all.

I ordered a carne paella and it was immaculate! I will have to note that the chunks of beef were huge, but one was really fatty with gristle.

My mother also enjoyed her vegetable mofongo plate and empanadilla de bacalao (saltfish).

Their coco arepas appetizer were amazing! These fluffy buns of heaven were perfect and combining them with the guava dipping sauce is highly recommended! Also, order a side of their sweet plantains, they complement most meals nicely.

My uncle had the Mero en Salsa de Coco. This grouper fish plate was prepared tastefully and the sauce was also delicious.

Unfortunately, my cousins fish plate, the dorado in capers sauce, didn't meet expectations; Primarily, because the fish was overcooked & tough.

Overall, I enjoyed my meal here, but it almost never happened due to a lack of service. After reading some other reviews, I see this is an issue that plagues this business.

I hope that can get a hold of this through training and better serve...

I came here with my parents & husband. The positives are that my food (mofongo relleno de camarones) and my husband's food was delicious. Sadly, my mom's food was cold and her fries were soggy. The service was slower than molasses. Clearly the servers were doing the best to hustle and at the same time we waited a LONG time for our appetizer order to be taken. Then a double long time for our food order. I asked for water and i finished my food before my water arrived. When the food did finally arrive and my mom's food was cold we couldn't get anyone to come help us - we flagged down our server, we tried to flag down the manager, we ask another server to request our server come by - nothing. When our server finally came by their attitude was "well, we are busy" shrug When I reminded her of my request for water she said again, "we are busy i will get you water when I can." I had origonally wanted dessert but I had no desire to wait around for our server to bring us a menu, then eventually take our order, then eventually bring dessert meanwhile I die of thirst. So in summary, food was fine service was subpar. Unlikely I...

I ordered 1 fish taco and 1 shrimp taco. They were tasteful and served hot. While my husband ordered mash roots (majado) and egg battered Dorado (fish) nuggets and were served cold which we ended up paying for, since the waiter didn't offer to replace the food with a hotter meal, instead offered a free flan (vanilla custard). My stepson ordered a Mofongo with meat served with some sauce. The Mofongo was "bathe" with an exaggerated amount of sauce. The service was extremely slow and the wait for the food to be served was one and a half hours on a Wednesday evening. The waitress excused herself for the delay since they are short of personnel. I guess that, not until the employees stop receiving benefits from the Dept. of Labor, they won't go...