Weddingbee Blog

In Part 1, I summarized our trip. Now it’s time to talk about food. I love food. Even though I feel like I’m in a perpetual state of junk food –> diet –> junk food –> diet, I still really love me some food.

The Secrets Wild Orchid and St. James complex had five ’formal’ dining restaurants:

• El Patio (Mexican)
• Himitsu (Pan-Asian)
• Bordeaux (French)
• Portofino (Italian)
• Blue Mountain (Jamaican)

We had assumed that these restaurants offered different selections throughout the day but as it turns out, they are only open for dinner (and dinner starts at 6:00 PM; I’ll get back to that in a minute).

The formal dining restaurants were only open for dinner, so first let me tell you about the others.

For breakfast, we had choices between the World Cafe, room service, and the selection of little rolls and fruit they placed in our building’s lobby. We went to the World Cafe almost every day.

The World Cafe is a buffet-style dining environment that is formed by seating people in the El Patio and Blue Mountain restaurants. They then allow you to walk into a back area where there is tons and tons of food.

At breakfast, there were selections including:

• An omelet station
• Various toasts, muffins, breads and pastries
• Bacon, sausage, and other breakfast meats
• Jamaican veggie and curried selections
• Various fruit smoothies, mimosas or bloody marys
• Fruits, cheeses and crackers
• Pancakes, crepes and french toast
• Cereal, granola and dried fruits

If you could imagine eating it for breakfast, they had it. They serve breakfast from 7 until 11 AM.

Then for lunch (which—as we found out—doesn’t start until 12:30), we would return to the same restaurant to find:

• A pasta station
• Various meats including pork ribs, chicken, beef, veal, goat and lamb
• Seafood including mussels, calamari, fried fish, and crab salad
• Salad fixins galore
• A taco/nacho station
• Mini-sandwiches and finger-foods
• Rolls, breads and dessert smorgasbord
• Ice cream (one day, we saw vanilla, but every other day the selections were strawberry or pistachio).
• Other selections that would change daily (e.g. On the 4th of July, they had hot dogs and hamburgers.)

If you didn’t want the World Cafe for breakfast, you were pretty much SOL. But for lunch, there were a few other options.

The Oceana (open 11-5; located by the Wild Orchid pool)

We ate at the Oceana on our fifth day. They had self-serve appetizers (mostly seafood salads) and a menu for the main course. Good views too!

I can’t remember everything that was on the menu, but it was good stuff: hamburgers, hot dogs, flatbread, and chicken were among the selections. Here’s my Jerk Chicken & Pineapple flatbread pizza, and Mr. MJ’s burger in the background.

Another bonus to both of the seaside restaurants was that they are right next to the bars. Oceana is next to the Marlin bar. Throughout the resort, you can get any drink you want. But it’s really fast when you’re eating so close to the bartenders’ ’home base’!

The Seaside (open 11-5; located by the St. James pool)

On our ninth day (when I was thoroughly tired of eating a the World Cafe), we decided to hike over to the Seaside for lunch. It’s on the other side of the resort from where we tended to lounge around.

I really liked the Seaside. They had a slightly different (and, IMHO, better) menu than the Oceana, and I just liked the ambiance a little more.

Mr. Mary Jane and I both got burgers this time, and they were SO good.

The Sugar Reef bar is located nearby too (and interestingly, I repeatedly found that this bar had more selection and made better drinks than the bars on the Wild Orchid side of the resort).

All of the eating establishments I’ve discussed so far were open earlier in the day, with a more casual dress code. We could traipse in wearing board shorts or swimsuit cover ups and flip-flops - it was not a big deal. But in the evening, things got fancier (for men, in particular). Women had to wear decent clothing (i.e. no swimming suit cover ups or wet clothes). For men, long pants, collared shirts, and closed-toed shoes were expected. We saw many people violating the closed-toed shoe rule without consequence, but we also saw some folks turned away at the doors because the guy was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Luckily, we knew about this when we packed: Mr. MJ brought a pair of khaki pants and some sandals that concealed his toes.

Some people dressed fancier than others. I saw women dressed like myself (sun dresses), and I saw women wearing 4″ shiny heels paired with tight clubbing clothes. I saw men in Hawaiian shirts and linen, and other men sporting ties and dress shoes. Basically, whatever people wanted to wear was OK, as long as it fit the minimum dress codes. (If you didn’t *bring* the right clothes, they wouldn’t starve you though - people who were not dressed quite right simply had to eat on the patios rather than inside the restaurant.)

Now that you know about the dress codes, what about the food?? Here we go.

El Patio (Mexican)

I really liked this food. (Tequila chocolate cake for dessert was a winner, too!) We had these lovely sweet potato chips as an appetizer:

And then our main dishes were as follows. Mr. Mary Jane’s cheesy chicken:

And my seafood burrito:

Which contained actual seafood, as proven by this tentacle I pulled out of my mouth:

Seriously though, this was pretty good food. We only ate here once (the only restaurant we tried twice was Blue Mountain, actually), but we enjoyed it and would have definitely gone there again.

Himitsu (Pan-Asian)

We had high hopes for this, the second restaurant we tried at the resort. We both enjoy spicy food, Chinese and Japanese dishes, and I like some Thai food as well. Himitsu has three Teppenyaki stations (where you can sit and watch the guy fancily prepare your food), but we did not make reservations for that. Besides, we could see them from our table anyway! Here we are at Himitsu.

We look at little apprehensive because the menu was… well… a little odd.

And yeah. Mr. Mary Jane ordered fried rice. It was more equivalent to a big bowl of peas and onions, with a little rice tossed in for fun. My Pad Thai was actually pretty good, except that it had an eyeball in it. Wanna see?

Ok, yes. I do know (now) that it is Lychee. Am I such a Midwestern shut-in that I was unable to recognize this particular type of fruit? I truly have never seen one before. Anyway, I ate the tentacle at El Patio, but I could not eat this eyeball thing. I nibbled it, but it tasted too eyebally so I had to leave it behind. We didn’t go back to Himitsu (and in fact, we grazed our lobby for snacks after supper, still hungry from our sub-par meal of peas, onions and eyeballs).

Bordeaux (French)

This was good. I forget exactly what was in my meal, but the appetizer was goat cheese wrapped in phyllo:

And my entree was some very tender chicken with white-wine sauce.

Mr. Mary Jane ordered these absolutely delicious lamb chops.

Both meals were served with mashed potatoes, and some banana chips sticking out of the top. Great presentation. We’d have eaten there again for sure (if we had more days).

Portofino (Italian)

I was worried about this restaurant because Mr. Mary Jane doesn’t particularly care for most pastas or Italian-seasoned food in general. But I think it pleased us both!

First off, how can you not be pleased when you’re dining near a fabulous chandelier such as this?

Seriously, I loved that thing! But the food was good too. He got this red snapper:

And I got Carbonara (yay bacon!).

Here we are about to enjoy the meal.

I think this was our seventh day in Jamaica (Wednesday, July 7). We had gotten some sun at this point, as you can see. After dinner, we grabbed some beverages at the nearby Piano Bar.

Liquor connoisseurs, you can see a few of the selections in the background.

In fact, let me take a moment to talk about the drink selection. It seemed like they had a lot of choices. I’d consider some of it Top Shelf (i.e. Maker’s Mark, Grey Goose), but some of it wasn’t (i.e. Jose). Many of the mixed drinks they served during the day contained Appleton Rum, of course. And everywhere you went you could find a Red Stripe or a glass of champagne. On the beach, you could pick from their list of drinks or order your own concoctions. My favorite was a drink called a Bob Marley - basically a strawberry, banana and blue-curacao blended daiquiri that was styled in Rasta colors.

The resort also had a wine cellar, but wine wasn’t all-inclusive (which I thought was odd). We contemplated buying a bottle from their fancy wine menu, which they’d show us each night as we sat down to dinner (we had a coupon voucher for $10 off). We are not really ’wine lovers’ though, so I had no frame of reference for how much to pay for a good bottle when we did not recognize the winery names. Then I saw one I did recognize: Alice White. And it was $40 U.S. We decided to skip the wine.

But, I digress. We still have one more restaurant to discuss!

Blue Mountain (Jamaican)

I don’t know why we saved the Jamaican restaurant for last, but we did. (But for what it’s worth, it’s the only restaurant we ate at twice!)

Here I am, waiting to order and sporting some killer tan (or burn!) lines. (This was Day 8, after all.)

The first time we went, I ordered this little appetizer salad. I think it had eggplant and zucchini, and I’m not sure what else…

It was not my thing. I ate the chevre off the top and the little tomatoes, but I couldn’t eat the rest. Mr. Mary Jane, on the other hand, got a great little fish cake. I have no picture of it because we ate it so fast. (I may have stolen a few bites.) It was spicy and awesome.

Then my main dish: Curried Goat.

Mr. Mary Jane ordered Jerk Chicken.

Both of those dishes were absolutely amazing. The side dishes were cauliflower with red beans & rice. Between this meal and the meal at Bordeaux, these were the best meals we had at the resort.

Room Service

Preferred Club members also get 24-hour room service. We used this twice, and really only enjoyed it once. One caveat (which makes sense, but is inconvenient) is that they won’t deliver room service when it’s raining. (So if it’s pouring out and you don’t want to hike to dinner, they aren’t going to hike your dinner to you either.) We ordered Jamaican Jerk Chicken both times we got room service (by the way) and it was really good once, but really dry the other time. (We actually ended up going down to Blue Mountain (our second trip in two days!) to get some better food after realizing how crummy this particular room service meal was.) Service-wise, it was fast, friendly, and the food was hot when we received it. Funny though: they can’t bring you any beverages, even water!

Our Candlelight Dinner

If we hadn’t received this as part of our honeymoon package, we wouldn’t have paid for it. (It costs $480!!) But since it was free, we took it!

This is a picture Mr. MJ took of someone else’s dinner being set up. Ours was on the gazebo, which we loved! So private, with wonderful views.

We were given three choices for our menu, and both of us had to choose the same food. The menus were laid out as five courses, and you could not pick and choose which item you wanted for each course. This proved slightly problematic for Mr. Mary Jane and I because we tend to gravitate toward different types of food, but luckily one of the menus had a pretty good selection of courses.

(Photo by the Secrets photographer; edited by me)

We had the same white wine chicken I had at Bordeaux a few nights prior. I can’t remember all of our courses, but I know there was a shrimp salad and some mango & passion fruit sorbet. Our dessert was a heavenly piece of chocolate cake. (But even though the food was excellent, it really was just food from the restaurants. And for $500? They should have sent someone to town and gotten some damn KFC if I wanted some. Seriously.) But I suppose people pay for the ambiance and exclusive service. Our waiter, Michael, was serving only us and he was extremely polite (and fast) with our food. Even though he was walking the food halfway across the resort, it was hot and fresh when we received it. It was a really cool experience.

Things to Consider

There are a lot of food selections at this resort, and many of them are what one might call “gourmet” or “frou-frou”. While I’m fairly open when it comes to food, Mr. Mary Jane is more of a pepperoni-pizza kind of guy. He still found plenty of good food to eat in the evenings (most nights, at least!). We were both pretty happy to see hamburgers on the menu at the Seaside and Oceana though (even though we only had them twice during our stay).

One thing we thought was a little lacking was the desserts. I know, I told you there was a smorgasbord of dessert options. And there was. But it was mostly fruit or cheesecake-based selections. We Mary Janes prefer cookies and candy to tiramisu or macaroons. (In fact: the one day we saw cookies on the buffet, I seriously considered bringing in a zip lock bag so we could stockpile them!) So if you’re going to this resort and you’re concerned about the food, don’t be. It was definitely satisfactory, and some of it was totally awesome. The breakfast and lunch selections are huge, too: definitely something for everyone. The beauty of it is: it’s all inclusive. So if you don’t like your meal at one restaurant, you can hop on over to another.

And if you’re still concerned? I’ll let you in on a little ’insider tip’: they sell Twix and Snickers bars in the gift shop.

In my next post, I’ll review the resort as a whole.