3lmaiDy
Google
Do not come here for dinner without a reservation. Do not join the waitlist. The restaurant is incapable of dealing with one and the experience is absolutely not worth the time you have to dedicate and the frustration you have to deal with. Details below.
La Regatta is a restaurant that provides solid food options, on an attractive menu with a variety of interesting choices. What I ate here (Orzo pasta with lobster and a lime sauce; Johnny Cay Ceviche) was good. It wasn’t spectacular, but good. Solid. Same goes for the waiters, provided you know a few words of Spanish. The drink was okay.
However, that quality does not align with the prices charged. To justify paying as much per person as other good restaurants on the island would charge for three, the cuisine and service should be spectacular, and they very much are not.
And in the case of the dinner-time hostess and organisation, the experience is atrocious.
The restaurant is in high demand, so people line up. So far, so ordinary. However, the restaurant hostess staff is incapable of dealing with this demand without letting every single guest know that they are expandable. I had one of the most frustrating and impolite treatments here of all restaurants I have ever visited.
The hostess is not to be approached to add yourself to the waitlist, instead, her colleague, whose entire attitude is very much discouraging, is to be told the name. You do not get any timing indication. When I asked for one, I was told that it is impossible to predict. When I asked whether it will be longer than an hour or an hour, I was told it will be an hour, more or less. There is no option to get a text when your table is getting ready. Instead, you have to wait in line, standing or, if you‘re lucky, sitting, while the hostess says a lucky name every 15 minutes into a microphone that feeds into a speaker that blows your ears off every time it is used.
After 2.5 hours, I asked the hostess how many people remained in front of me. I was told it was three. When I asked whether that includes those people who come in on reservations, I was not provided with an answer, instead I was asked to give the hostess 20 seconds. After 15 seconds, she asked me to go back to the waiting area, she would call me up shortly. Half an hour later, the clock was approaching 2200, after witnessing another 5 groups from the waitlist that had come after me being welcomed in, I decided to cut my losses, have dinner elsewhere and return for lunch.
Spare yourself that experience and either come for lunch, when reservations are usually available on short notice, or skip it altogether. Not worth the hype or price.
