Not to be confused with my previous review of Restaurante El Carmen, Carmen is a high end
restaurant located inside a fancy boutique hotel in Cartagena. It was recommended to us by my co-worker who had just been to Cartagena a few weeks before me and it was rated as the #1 restaurant in Cartagena on Tripadvisor as well. So it must be pretty good, right?
I generally am not a huge fan of hotel restaurants because I don't normally find them to be authentic and they're usually overpriced - and honestly, Carmen wasn't all that different. It is indeed in a very lovely boutique hotel with a lovely open air courtyard setting. It's quite romantic - so not really what I was looking for but hey, there are worse things in life, right?
The menu is not really a very traditional Colombian but don't get me wrong because everything did sound very tasty. It seems much more like American creative/fusion. While South America is pretty well known for its love affair with beef, I hadn't really had any beef up until this point - I had been focusing on eating as much fresh seafood as possible. So I finally got my red meat fill here with the beef tenderloin ($25) and Allison got the shrimp taco appetizer ($15) and the crab duo ($17.50).
The beef itself was totally fine - they were sliced into several medallion like pieces and on a bed of extremely buttery potato puree and also served with braised swiss chard. It was a solid beef dish but given how famous South America is for their beef I was kind of expecting more from it. I thought the beef was going to be like butter and melt in my mouth but I still had to do some cutting and chewing. I had a bite of the shrimp tacos and they were pretty good - the shrimp had a sweet chili glaze and it was served with seaweed aioli, scallion and kimchi on it.
While we were ordering the waiter had raved about the crab duo, so I was excited to try it. It was crab served two ways: one was like a traditional crab cake and the other was a crispy crab claw. As someone who is a crab connoisseur, I have a high expectation of how my crab is and one of my biggest pet peeves is when crab cake has too much filler. Unfortunately, the crab cake and the crab claws both had too much filler and breading for me and I couldn't really taste the fresh crab.
While I did enjoy my meal, the place felt a bit too bougie/fancy for me. It's not to say that I don't appreciate the finer foods in life, but I didn't really get why this place was rated the #1 restaurant in Cartagena. It's a lovely place for cocktails, so I would recommend hitting up this place first for some drinks and then going elsewhere for some more local food and at cheaper prices. Total bill: $43/pp
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