I’m looking for restaurant recommendations for Old San Juan – from looking at TripAdvisor, I get the impression many restaurants are short staffed, resulting in poor service and food that is not worth the wait.
So – please tell me about recent positive experiences!
We found eating out in OSJ to be a bit tricky, due to cruise ship crowds - especially for lunch, when passengers from multiple ships had all ascended on the town. We are not foodies and we were looking to keep costs down for this trip, so we did not make any dinner reservations at the nicer restaurants. We just wandered around for the 2 days we were there and stopped when we found a place that seemed interesting and didn’t have a long wait. Our favorite experience was at Deaverdura. It was on our list to check out, but the line outside was long every time we checked. Finally got 2 seats at the bar around 4 pm on our 2nd day. Had fun with the bartender and a few of the locals who were hanging out, and enjoyed the sampler platter of traditional foods. We also found a hole in the wall bar that served up some tasty empanadas - we went back there a 2nd time because it was easy, cheap and fun atmosphere.
Overall I would say the food was the least impressive thing about OSJ (except for the lovely breakfasts cooked for us at our B&B.) My OSJ tip is to check the cruise schedules and plan accordingly: get to the forts early and stay further away from the pier area until the ships pull out in the late afternoon. Despite the cruise crowds, we loved exploring OSJ!
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