For three years the question I was asked about Tulum was whether anyone serious still went. The answer, this season, is yes — and the reason is a short list of restaurants that have outlasted the period when the place tried to be photographed into something it was not.
Hartwood, the open-fire restaurant Eric Werner and Mya Henry built on the beach road in 2010, is still the table. The reservation system has not improved. You queue from three in the afternoon at the open-air bar for an eight o'clock seat, you eat what was on the boat that morning cooked over wood, and you understand within fifteen minutes why the kitchen has not been copied successfully anywhere. The wood-fired octopus and the suckling pig remain on the menu because the people who come back ask for them by name.
Arca is the other one. José Luis Hinostroza, formerly of Noma and Alinea, opened the kitchen on the same road a decade ago, and the cooking has only sharpened since the noise around Tulum quieted. The tasting menu is the order; the long bar at the back is the seat. The kitchen now sources almost everything within forty kilometres, and the result is that a meal at Arca tastes more like the Yucatán than any meal at any of the celebrity-chef pop-ups that briefly dominated the strip.
Hotel Esencia, twenty minutes north toward the airport on the Xpu-Há beach, is where the conversation moved to. The hotel was built in the seventies as a private estate for an Italian duchess and has remained, across two ownerships, the quietest piece of land on the coast. Kitchen Table — the chef's-counter restaurant on the property — is the dinner of the week if you are staying anywhere along the beach. Book it ahead; the seats are eight.
The pattern is clear enough. The clients I now send to this coast spend two nights in Tulum proper for Hartwood and Arca, then move to Esencia for the rest of the trip. The jungle cabanas that defined the place for a decade are no longer the point. The cooking is. The light is the same as it always was.
— Camille Vedy
