Entrance to the beach restaurant …
After hours out in a boat, it is obviously time for lunch, and since all the luxury hotels in Los Cabos are closed the gal has to follow the horde and head for the beach in San Jose. Thank goodness someone suggested The Office, the most unlikely, and unsuitable, name for a restaurant since Mandarin Oriental London‘s DINNER (ideal for breakfast). Apart from the sign outside its entrance, and about ten feet, within, of cobbled under-foot, the entire restaurant simply consists of collapsible metal tables, set into sand. Tables are covered with big Mexican rough-weave cloths, fuchsia here, day-glo green there, buttercup yellow here, gentian blue there.
.. where tables and chairs sink far into the sand
The result is like a kaleidoscope, a constantly changing pattern of colour. Vacated tables are cleared like lightning, invariably with a different coloured cloth. When dishes are carried in, waiters also carry butler tables, with yet another cloth, which they sink into the sand. We sit at white metal chairs, sunk into the sand. Hawkers pass by, on the beach proper, but they only seem to worry those tables nearest them. The clientele is 100 percent foreign, the servers are 100 percent local men, wearing thick cummerbunds to match the table cloths: tucked into these bands are radios to place food orders.
Servers have covetable shirts
The waiters have fabulous shirts, which add to the overall colour of the place – apparently the owner of this clever theatre of food is called Edith, and she has a more traditional restaurant, up a side street nearby (same food but much higher prices, apparently). But this is where to come for ambience, and people-watching, and picking up some pretty loud noise from an adjacent beach restaurant that is a haunt of American students flocking here, especially from California and Texas, for Spring break. Many of the tables around us, here at The Office, are going Mexican, with guacamole and tacos and oodles of tequila poured from carafes into delicate champagne flutes.
A signature Paul Smith salad
But we are intrigued by the Paul Smith salad. Knowing the designer‘s penchant or stripes I expected it to be displayed in rows, but this is the – delicious – result. Other than the fashion afternoon tea served at The Berkeley in London, what luxury hotels dare to call dishes after fashion designers? I do not remember an Armani apple cake or a Bulgari biscuit…. now, that was lunch, so what about dinner?
