The Mandala beach club cabañas look nice and the area is what you'd expect from a bougie beach club catered towards spring breakers and foreigners. For $30 USD (or 500 pesos) paid upfront, you get a beach lounge chair with an umbrella. Any food and drink you order will be included up to 500 pesos (your cover) and you pay anything over that. The process for getting or wristbands and paying was pretty smooth and painless. Everyone was friendly and helpful.
The ambience was pretty good but definitely catered towards spring breakers. Note that around 3pm, a DJ comes out and starts blasting music, so this is not the place to be if you want a relaxing, quiet time on the beach.
The margaritas and piña coladas were good, no complaints there. Aside from the guac&chips and Mahi Mahi filet, which were delicious, the food was mediocre to average. I ordered the tuna coconut sushi roll, which didn't seem to have much or any tuna. The crispiness of the coconut around the roll was great, but I felt like I was mostly just eating rice and avocado. I also ordered the tiradito de pescado, which had the description "crispy lemon fish sticks." Please note that these are not the fish sticks Americans would think of; what came out was a bag of tortilla chips and a bowl of small strips of raw fish drizzled in lemon juice with onions, avocado, tomatoes, etc. We were surprised given the description, but since "tiradito de pescado" seems to be a thing, the description was just not precise. It was average and I wouldn't order again. Finally, I ordered chocolate cake and vanilla flan for dessert. The cake was very wet, reminiscent of tres leche cake, which maybe it was but nothing in the name or description would have indicated that. It was ok--I didn't finish it and I wouldn't order it again. The vanilla flan was decent.
The service was slow but our server was very friendly and attentive.
Our 3-star experience became a 2-star experience at the end of our time there. After we closed out our bill, we thanked our server, tipped him, and started walking out. However, another man who worked there came out and stopped us, counted the tip we handed our server, and demanded us tip more. He explained that the 200 pesos we left unspent on our tab could not count towards our tip and that what we separately gave our server was not enough. We didn't know this, so we did not mean to skimp out on our server. However, he pulled out a calculator and typed out an amount he wanted us to pay. While we did not mind paying more tip to help our server, it was an extremely uncomfortable experience to be stopped and pressured to tip more. Perhaps if it was clear at any point before this (such as when they first pitched the lounge chairs to us, when we paid for them, when we were closing out the tab) that we were basically required to tip a set amount and would be uncomfortably confronted and prevented from leaving if we didn't, this all could have been avoided. The way the man stopped us and insisted we pay more was extremely unpleasant and made us initially feel like he was trying to take advantage of us for being tourists. If you go here, be sure to tip generously (regardless of service quality) if you don't want to be stopped on the way out.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend this place to my friends because it's not a great value for the experience. However, if you just want a lounge chair near the beach, don't care about the food, and are willing to shell out $30+tip, this is a pretty decent option since there aren't many more places to get lounge chairs if you're not staying at a beachside resort. read more