Trip Report Cozumel, February/March 2025: diving and lots of restaurants

[Cornbread O'Malley]

Cerveceria Punta Sur

I stopped in to get some IPA and see if they had lionfish ceviche available. I found the IPA but no lionfish. Instead, I spied on the menu “ceviche chapulin” or grasshopper ceviche. I was feeling adventurous and placed my order! I had the Sunshine IPA and in short order my food arrived (pics 42-44). The grasshoppers had a slight crunch. I could not discern any real grasshopper taste because the dish was soaked in lime juice and the other ingredients masked the taste of the grasshoppers. I ate about half the plate. This is not the first time I ate grasshoppers. The first time I tried grasshoppers was at a Seattle Mariners baseball game. Grasshoppers is a concessions option at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. They are served roasted and seasoned with lemon pepper.

 

[Cornbread O'Malley]

La Chi Breakfast

I think this place is relatively new. They serve chilaquile and enchilada dishes mostly. I forgot the name of the item I ordered, but it consisted of enchiladas with eggs served on bean sauce and topped with chorizo (pic 45). There was a variety of chili sauces provided, but none of them really appealed to me. The one spicy condiment was made with red chiles and peanuts mixed canola and olive oil (pic 46). The mixture had quite a spicy kick, and I really enjoyed it on my food.

 

[Cornbread O'Malley]

La Clasica

My friends and I enjoyed drinks here but not any food back in December 2024. I remembered seeing the seafood crispy tostadas and made a mental note to return and try them. I first ordered the tuna tartar (pic 48) and the flavors of the fried leek, eel sauce, and sesame seeds made the dish very good. Then I tried the shrimpy tuna (pic 49) with its soy sauce condiment. Both items were delicious.

 

[Cornbread O'Malley]

El Cielito Bistro

A guy on one of the charters told me about the famous chamorro de cerdo, pork shank, at El Cielito. The location of this restaurant is across the street from Del Sur Parilla Argentina. Two restaurants that serve delicious meat dishes are right next to each other! The pork shank was very tender but not fall-off-the-bone tender, which makes cutting off bite-size pieces quite satisfying. The flavor profile was excellent, and I cleaned the plate! Interestingly, I did not feel overly full after finishing the dish.

 

[Cornbread O'Malley]

Guisados

Guisados is another one of those places that I walk past on most days but only until this trip did I stop and try it. The restaurant itself is very small. I sat down with no expectations and was pleasantly surprised to find that they use blue corn tortillas. I also liked the bed of rice in each tortilla. The rice enhanced the flavor profile and is something different compared to the other taquerias around town. I ordered cactus and mushrooms, pork steak in green sauce, and smoked pork chop for my tacos. The cactus and mushrooms was one of several vegetarian taco options. I really liked it; it was something different.

 

[LI-er]

I noted some disadvantages with going with Geiser’s charters. Geiser will not run charters on days when he does not have enough divers. This may be negotiable, and I am not exactly sure what his minimums are.

This is my one longstanding complaint with dive charters as a whole.

A diver may take a week or two of his or her prized vacation days from work to go on a dive vacation. He or she may book plane travel and hotel accommodations and even a rental car. Despite booking dives perhaps a month in advance at their favorite places, they may very well be told- often late in the afternoon the day before the scheduled dive (when it's too late to find an alternate charter), "sorry we don't have enough divers to be profitable, the trips not going to run".

Can you imagine if airline companies did this? "Sorry we canceled the flight, not enough passengers to make it worth the gas".

Many of these charters aren't incurring a lot of additional costs taking out 1 or 2 divers as compared to 3 or 4. It's a quick ride out to the site so the gas is minimal and all other charges are fixed.

Yeah I know, the crew won't get much in the way of tips. Too bad, you picked a profession that's going to have busy days with lots of tips and some days you work for almost nothing. You were planning to go anyway, it's not like you had anything more important scheduled that day.

When booking a future trip, I ALWAYS ask about minimums and how often they meet them, and choose dive charters who require either no minimums (extremely rare) or low minimums and will allow me to pay for a "ghost diver" to make the numbers. Some won't even do that because of the lower tips.

If a dive boat cancels me due to minimums, they go to the bottom of my list when it comes to considering them for future dives. If they're even still on my list. At the very least I'll try to pick boats that are likely to meet those minimums.

Running the boat even if you won't do much more than cover the gas to satisfy customers, some of whom may have traveled thousands of miles and incurred many related expenses is called "customer service" something that dive charter companies oughta know something about.

 

[lowwall]

My trip partially overlapped yours. Here's a couple of the other steak options at Del Sur Parilla Argentina.

Short ribs above. I really wanted the arrachera, but the waiter said they were out. I thought they meant for the evening, so I went back a few days later at an earlier time where he explained they were out until the next cargo boat arrived. So I got the vacio. As you can see the steaks come with chimichurri, some potatoes and the typical Argentine salad of lettuce, onion and tomato.

 

[ggunn]

This is my one longstanding complaint with dive charters as a whole.

A diver may take a week or two of his or her prized vacation days from work to go on a dive vacation. He or she may book plane travel and hotel accommodations and even a rental car. Despite booking dives perhaps a month in advance at their favorite places, they may very well be told- often late in the afternoon the day before the scheduled dive (when it's too late to find an alternate charter), "sorry we don't have enough divers to be profitable, the trips not going to run".

Although I cannot claim that this does not happen with Cozumel dive ops, in 30 years and 600+ dives around Cozumel it has only happened twice to me for morning dives, and in both cases the op I was scheduled with placed me on another boat in time for me not to miss a dive day. YMMV.

 

[Johnoly]

What follows is a list of the restaurants and eateries that I found worth noting.

Great picts of the buildings which makes it easy to recognize when seeing them. Also the menu picts rarely shown here and much appreciated. Nice detailed report and thank you for taking the considerable time to write it up !!

 

[Fin59]

Love Chilangos!