Going Gluten-Free in Cancun, Mexico (at an All-Inclusive Resort)

If you are a Coeliac like me it can be quite daunting going on holiday.

I thought it might be useful to share my experience at the Moon Palace the Grand Cancun (a luxury all-inclusive hotel in Mexico).

It’s quite detailed, but if you are a Celiac/Coeliac or just Gluten-Free, you will probably be quite glad for all the info you can get!

I am a Coeliac (Celiac), I found out four months ago; for those who don’t know it means I can’t eat any food with gluten in it, not even a crumb! Even foods that are cross-contaminated are a problem, so if I am to eat safely restaurants really have to know what they are doing.

It can be really daunting for a Coeliac to go on holiday, so I thought it might be useful to share my experience at the Grand at Moon Palace (a luxury all-inclusive hotel in Cancun). A little background to my trip, I’ve only been out to eat once since my diagnosis. I went to Cote (a French restaurant in London), and it went well. I had a lovely meal and felt normal which was nice. I wasn’t glutened, so big bonus!

Other than that I’ve been not that bothered about eating out and trying to avoid takeaways, as my local options are pitifully scarce so it’s hardly a temptation. Weirdly enough, most of the takeout options near me are Pizza based and they don’t look very appetising. In actual fact, they are smaller, more expensive, and don’t look very tasty (Gluten Free tax!).

Pouring through loads of social media posts, it seems quite clear that Coeliacs (Celiacs for my Transatlantic pals) aren’t well catered for generally. Yet strangely I get the feeling that things could be quite different if you know where to go on holiday. Let’s find out if it’s true.

Wait a sec. who are you? is the question I am sure no one is asking. Well anyway, I am Robin Alterman, Director at Sunny Escapes and some might say I have skin in the game; however, what follows is just my honest opinion which hopefully some might find quite useful.

Pre Departure I read a few blogs before I left which suggested I needed to pack a sizeable suitcase full of gluten-free (GF) emergency foods. I packed a bit, but not loads as I was feeling pretty confident the Grand at Moon Palace could handle my dietary requirements from all the stuff I had read online.

The Flight – BA LGW to CUN (10 hours) Put it like this, I was glad I brought some sandwiches and snacks with me.

The lunch was plain chicken, and unsurprisingly tasteless. The chicken was accompanied by couscous (edible) and a sorry-looking salad. Of course, I was treated to the obligatory rice crackers on the side (lucky me). Delightfully, I received a Ciabatta roll from Schar that should have been cooked, according to the packet, but wasn’t. Cheers British Airway, great job!

I couldn’t confidently identify the dinner I received later as food, so gave it a wide berth. To be honest most of the rest of the passengers including my family (muggles*) didn’t look like they were enjoying their food either. I figured the return journey wouldn’t be much better.

• Muggles are what Coeliac folk call non-coeliacs.

The Hotel – The Grand at Moon Palace in Cancun I should confess that I’ve been to the Grand three times before (pre-Coeliac) so I really know my way around. I know the restaurants pretty well, both in the Grand and all over the Moon Palace. I’ve worked in travel for around 13 years and visited more than 50 hotels in the Cancun region in 8 previous trips, so I am quite well placed to compare it to other similar hotels.

I know the Grand is an incredible hotel, with probably some of the best food you can get in almost any all-inclusive hotel in Cancun. To be honest, I doubt anyone can truly verify this, as there are probably 800+ hotels in the area, but I would say it’s an educated guess.

The hotel is to my mind indisputably a great hotel, and of course incredibly Grand! I am very lucky to have been here so many times. I was, however, concerned that being Coeliac would take the gloss off this incredible hotel, and it wouldn’t be the same.

I must make it clear that this is my experience, but I cannot guarantee that it will be yours! I am literally putting my body on the line for you to read this!

First Few Days The first few days were crucial to my understanding of what and where I can eat, so this is what I discovered:

On arrival at the hotel, I didn’t have time to inform Guest Services about my Coeliac personally as advised pre-travel. I had, however, mentioned it on the Palace Resorts app pre-check-in. It’s definitely worth downloading this app, it’s very useful but not perfect! You can see all the restaurant menu’s from the app, make reservations, and a lot more.

We got in pretty late and made our way confidently to the Lebanese restaurant Habibi, an old favourite of ours. I was armed with an incredibly useful Coeliac card in Spanish that I purchased from Coeliac Sanctuary, which I highly recommend. It certainly made life much easier, and throughout the course of my stay, many people saw this card and were instantly enlightened.

It was very late, 9 pm Mexican time, but about 3 am for us, so needless to say we were knackered, and not up for a big meal. I flashed the card at the restaurant front desk and was pleased by the knowing reaction I received. At the table, I asked the waiter what I can have and he simply said “rice and salad”. I was disappointed, but it turned out I didn’t ask the right question.

Important tip: Have a look at the menu when you go to a restaurant, then tell the waiter what you would like. All the GF options will be clearly shown on the menu. They should go off and discuss your choices with the Chef to see if they can make food Coeliac safe. It is easier if you pick the clearly marked GF items on the menu, but you’d be surprised what they can make for you if they exclude Gluten components, like the sauces. The restaurant staff here are well trained in how to avoid cross-contamination in all the main restaurants.

Habibi has a separate GF oven, and the Chefs are certainly clued up. They whipped me up some flamed grilled Chicken skewers and rice (Shish Touk) which were delicious, and about all I could handle at the time. In actuality, they made me four massive perfectly grilled skewers two of which I had to offload to my family. So far so good, and not glutened! I won’t keep talking about being glutened, but I will mention it if it happens, which of course wouldn’t be good.

Breakfast: Caribeno Caribeno is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Breakfast is a buffet, but for lunch and dinner, Caribeno is essentially a seafood restaurant. It’s not the biggest buffet, but we like that, it’s usually not too busy and the service is top-notch.

I flashed my GF Free card at the front desk lady, who told the waiter who in turn called the manager. Together they made me feel at ease. They suggested not getting food from the Buffet, so instead, I told them what I fancied, and they brought all the food to me. To be honest I felt a bit special as most people don’t get to eat a ‘la carte at a buffet!

The breakfast was really good: a plate of beautifully sweet and fresh melon and a delicious omelette.

Lunch This was when I realized that I probably needed to speak to guest services. It was chucking it down with rain and we got stuck in the lobby. In these circumstances in previous visits, I grabbed a sandwich from the Boulangerie (coffee shop plus) or went to the Grand Buffet for a quick bite. The lady at the Boulangerie said that basically, everything had Gluten in it, so I knew this was a no-go. The Grand Buffet was heaving so I found it a bit daunting, imagining, probably wrongly, that they wouldn’t be able to handle me.

I was frustrated, and headed back to my room and grabbed one GF snack I had brought with me. At this point, I figured maybe I hadn’t packed enough backup food, and getting sweet stuff was going to be problematic. On previous visits, we often went to the Boulangerie throughout the day. It’s a bit like Starbucks on steroids, and it’s free and very hard to resist.

Guest Services Disappointed by my lunch experience and suffering from sugar withdrawal I trudged off to Guest Services.

Please know that If I name any staff in this lengthy blog, it is with prior consent. I believe that service levels at this hotel are exceptionally high, although when the hotel is busy sometimes the staff can get a bit flustered in some restaurants, which I think is totally understandable.

So anyway, I sat down with a very nice chap at guest services who told me he would inform all the restaurants that they have a Coeliac in residence. I was still a bit concerned so I asked to speak to a Food and Beverages Manager.

This didn’t happen until I came back a second time when an incredibly nice lady (Mariana) spent more than half an hour making all my concerns melt away. She gave me her Whatsapp details and told me to message her every time I was going to go anywhere to eat. I suspect she may have come to regret this, as I messaged her a lot! She was totally brilliant and made my stay so smooth and effortless. She organized almost every meal in advance for me, so I was confident that I would be fine wherever I ate. She arranged for desserts to be sent to every restaurant I went to if required.

She also gave me an email address for Guest Services if I couldn’t get hold of her. She called over one of the restaurant managers (Eduardo) who suggested I make a plan of every restaurant we wanted to visit, so they could be prepared for my arrival. All good stuff, at this point I was feeling total spoilt, with not a care in the world.

Dinner: Jade Jade was a great restaurant for us on our previous visit. We ate there five times so it obviously doesn’t suck! When I arrived at the restaurant I went through the pre-eating routine that I had just developed.

Pre-eating Routine 1) Give your room number to the restaurant front desk staff, who should automatically know someone in your party is a Coeliac. Point out to them who it is, a quick flash of your Coeliac eating card doesn’t hurt either!

• Flash the Coeliac card at the waiter too.
• Check through the menu and tell the waiter what you might like to have, they may call over the Chef, or just check with Chef.

The waiter should come back to you and tell you what you can eat, which in this instance wasn’t very much. I may have missed a trick here, as I didn’t know what to ask for. To cut a long story short, I ended up with rice with vegetables which was pretty good, but also unseasoned chicken and beef skewers which were mostly tasteless.

As it turns out Jade uses gluten in most of their sauces, so they were a bit scared to feed me anything that wasn’t plain. It was disappointing, but the rest of my family wolfed down their food, so it must have been pretty good. I didn’t stick around for dessert.

I decided I wouldn’t go back to Jade for the rest of my stay. I am not convinced it’s the place for Coeliacs.

For Muggles (Non-Coeliacs) it’s very good, although the service can be patchy.

Lunch: Cusco Cusco for lunch is a buffet.

It’s not the biggest buffet, it’s a large restaurant but has a comparatively small buffet. It’s located out in the corner of the resort, and we often find it to be quite empty for breakfast and lunch. Today was no exception. This is no reflection on the food, purely the location. People seem to want to be where the action is I’ve noticed (generally the Grand Lobby), even if it means they have to wait longer for their food. After going through the Pre-eating routine, the chef whipped me up some Chicken and Potatoes. Pretty decent, but not mind-blowing! They surprised me with a GF dessert – Panna Cotta and took great pride in doing so, which was rather sweet of them.

In the afternoon, we head off to the waterpark, and upon our return to the room, I was pleasantly surprised to find six large GF chocolate brownies and a big pot of tea. They were excellent and I was dead chuffed. I knew I was going to be well looked after from here on in at the Grand. It’s probably worth mentioning that whenever meals were cooked exclusively for me, which I suspect was most of the time, I was given huge portions. I knew I would return to the UK more of a man than I left! (4 kilos more to be precise).

Dinner: Habibi Full Disclosure: I love this restaurant, and if I could eat dinner here every day I probably would! It’s peculiarly not busy when everything else is. Actually, it’s totally mystifying, but then people are weird. The staff here are so lovely and incredibly accommodating. I can’t imagine feeling less anxious about eating at a restaurant than I do right here, and am trying to work out ways to franchise this restaurant and bring it back to the UK.

I’ll talk more about this and other restaurants, and the food later.

Tea and Cakes (Dessert) As an Englishman, I feel dutybound to have tea and cake at 4 pm (or Tiffin if you are of a certain age). I mentioned a few times that I was concerned I would struggle with desserts, cakes, biscuits, etc to Guest Services. I told them I love all things chocolate, and later reiterated this point in a WhatsApp and an email, with my suggestions of what they could do to make me happy! I figured it was my holiday, and why shouldn’t I be as gluttonous* as everyone else at the hotel?

From this point on, tea and cakes were delivered to my room at 4 pm daily, definitely a nice touch. After 5 days of receiving Chocolate Brownies in my room, I spoke to Eduardo again, and he managed to switch up the tea-time cakes for me. It’s also worth keeping in touch with Guest Services and letting them know what desserts you want for an evening, or things could get repetitive.

• Interesting that the word Gluttonous and Gluten are quite similar? Do you have to eat Gluten to be Gluttonous, I wonder; possibly, but not at this hotel!

Drinks I was concerned about drinks, so I mentioned this at Guest Services, and was informed that the bars and restaurants were kept totally separate, and the drinks without gluten in them naturally wouldn’t be contaminated. So all good on that front! However, drinks did turn out to be quite problematic, as the bar staff were never that confident of which drinks I could safely consume. I was told frequently that Vodka was safe, but that’s not my tipple. Unfortunately, there is definitely room for improvement here, as I mostly drank Tea, Water and Lemonade throughout my stay, interspersed with the odd Miami Vice. I felt the safest drinking at restaurants, but not at any outside bars.

Room Service This worked pretty well, but allow plenty of time for your food. We placed the order on the app which is pretty decent and very promptly received a phone call from the kitchen just checking which food needed to be GF. The food arrived quite quickly and was surprisingly tasty. I had the same experience with both breakfast and lunch orders. Room service can also deliver food poolside if organized