Dan Pablo Gourmet Restaurant – Ambar Resort Food Redeemed?

So the gourmet restaurant on our last night at the resort managed to help redeem the food experience for us – at least a little bit.  This helped carry us through to the final day of our trip, and re-energized our spirits after a long diving trip to the other side of the island (Catalina).  The good new is, I will not need to create another top ten list of all the bad things that could go wrong, like the El Olivo experience. 🙂

On our final night at the resort in the Dominican, we had a reservation for one of the other two remaining restaurants in the Ambar adults-only section of the Gran Bahia Principe property: the Don Pablo Gourmet restaurant.

This started off much better from the very beginning. The welcome drink was a Pink Lady (vodka, cointreau, and cranberry juice), which was tasty and not overly sweet. Once we sat down, we were pleased to see that there wasn’t a single type of buffet in sight! Now this was exciting…

The servers were very, very friendly, and we could sense that this food experience would have to be better than the last.  Once we sat down, we had an appetizer that included chicken covered in a thin blue cheese sauce on top of what appeared to be a crostini. This was alright, but I probably wouldn’t have ordered it if I had the choice again.

Followed by that, we both tried the Camembert Fingers Salad, with a rosemary vinaigrette dressing. The cheese was nice and moist and the dressing was light and tart, with a touch of sweetness to it in the form of honey. I think this was probably my favourite dish (besides the dessert).

As our mains, we had the Chateaubriand, medium rare, and the Lobster. The Chateaubriand was a bit overcooked for my liking – it was more of a medium. However, our server came up to the table with the tenderloin and cut it up for us right there, and added the peppercorn sauce on top (a sweet mustard sauce was the other choice). It was served  with a variety of veggies, including mushrooms, asparagus, red peppers, carrots, and potatoes.

The lobster was served with mashed potatoes and vegetables, and a garlic butter sauce. Thankfully, I did not have déjà vu, and this did not bring me back to any reminders of socks, or any other dirty laundry for that matter (see my last post). The lobster meat was quite tender, and who doesn’t like garlic butter? Overall, it was a pretty good dish.

For dessert,  we chose the Coconut Surprise with the mango coulis (was a bit dry at first, but it got better and better the more I ate and was great when you dipped it into the whipping cream and sweet coconut flakes), along with the Banana Flambe.

What was fun about this was the server came to the table with all of the ingredients, and we got to see him light the dessert on fire with a little help of some Dominican Rum. We even shot a little video of it that I’ll post at a later date should you ever be inspired to try this at home.

The flambe was served with a chocolate tart cake, which had a touch of coffee flavouring to it – this went really well with the banana and the triple sec, lime, and butter sauce. 

After all this food in one sitting, we were quite full (especially since we hadn’t been eating a whole lot while enduring day after day at the buffets).  Now that meal was enough to satiate us for another 24 hours until we could have…airplane food. Go figure.