If you’re looking for a luxury meal that will blow your socks off (or flip-flops, in this climate), an excellent choice is a night of fine dining Italian style at the Portofino Restaurant in Ixtapa’s Las Brisas hotel.
One preliminary word: if you’re looking for a dining experience combined with a wide-open sunset view of a beach with an ocean breeze, you’ll not find it at Portofino. Portofino is a smaller, enclosed restaurant that offers instead an elegant-and-yet-highly comfortable ambiance that makes you happy to sink into its cozy seats and be pampered by the well-trained staff and master chef, Abel.
Hotel Las Brisas Ixtapa
Portofino has the distinction of preparing table-side dishes and the show that Chef Abel puts on is, from start to finish, absolutely delightful. For starters we had a perfect Caesar salad prepared right before our eyes, although the carpaccios are also an excellent choice for appetizers. The preparation of the Caesar, however, makes for a more lively opening visual spectacle to the meal. For the main course, what captured our attention on the entree menu were the fresh pastas accompanied by a choice of luscious seafood (lobster, shrimp, salmon) or thick and tender steaks.
After polishing off our salad, a grill-table on wheels was brought out and my jumbo shrimp were sauteed and the thick, juicy steaks that others of our group had ordered were seared right next to our table. As the moment of serving approached, an enormous round of fresh parmesan cheese with a large cavity hollowed out in its center was then wheeled out and as we watched a lovely quantity of the parmesan was grated and loosed from the central cavity. Mounds of freshly cooked pasta then emerged from the kitchen and were thrown, steaming, into the cheese cavity, melting the parmesan so it coated every strand of pasta and billowed out a lovely and appetizing aroma in the process. This was piled on each plate and tossed with fresh basil, other seasonings and sauces, and served with each person’s choice of meat or seafood. It was an outstanding combination that we thoroughly enjoyed. An how entertaining!
After we were done with that, do you think it couldn’t have gotten any better? Well, it did. Dessert (how could we possibly fit it in?) was a wickedly fine Crepes Suzette, again impeccably prepared and presented table-side by Portofino’s talented chef and staff. Mmmmmm.
Definitely an experience to try out if you haven’t already, and to repeat on a regular basis once you have!
Las Brisas Ixtapa Resort is located on Playa Vistahermosa in Ixtapa. Ask for directions to Portofino at the front desk. Phone: (52) (755) 553-2121. Calling in advance for reservations is a good idea.
