Just came back from a trip 1/11-1/17 trip with me, wife and almost 4 year old daughter, had an amazing time. Will also try and provide recap with some helpful info.
Flights:Copa (coach) nice spacious seats, bad/no food service. Felt like I had to beg to get a half cup of lukewarm water and food was fruit.
Delta on the return was fine, but I had a stopover in ATL and I'm IYH never doing that again. Spent the whole damn day traveling.
I paid for the first one with United miles and second one with CSR 1.5, I'm a little behind the game in general but going to spend the yr accumulating points and miles so I can have more/better options when we go back next year lol.
Hotel:1. Originally booked
Riu plaza - because our primary considerations (besides for cleanliness which all the premium hotels seem to check) were pool seating and room layout. Riu has massive pool with tons of seating and gives you a suite at a good value but there were 2 negatives. First we didn't notice the pool has no steps or shallow end - just 4 feet all around with letters to climb in/out. Our daughter can't swim by herself but can be trusted on her own in a shallow section. But this meant one of us would have to be in the pool the entire time. Secondly, and this was a show-stopper, there was a strong mildewy smell on our floor and in our room. Heat + carpets + no dehumidifiers is a bad recipe. We checked other rooms/floors but they were similar. So we sat up at night on the ipad looking at other hotels - only looking at hardwood floors to be safe - which meant Residence Inn, jw marriot or W. The first 2 didn't have availability, so
2. We went with
the W for the last 5 nights, which we know very well from Miami days (back when I had some SPG points and that was a thing). Generally it's a great hotel chain for singles/no kids - that's their brand. Layout didn't look as good as other 2 and pool smaller, but didn't have a choice. It ended up working out amazingly. Pool wasn't heavily used (the hotel in general didn't seem that booked) and had a shallow end with steps, and the double queen room was more than big enough. They even wheeled in a bed which the Riu wouldn't do (our daughter, who isn't picky about sleeping, had to sleep on a crib mattress thrown on the floor with blankets at Riu, but in the W she had her own huge bed and there was still plenty of space for us).
Food:Kava (dine in for dinner) - 4/5, recommend
We love the ambiance - it's very dark, good music.
White sangria was huge and had a nice sour aftertaste (we don't like it when it's too sweet).
Whiskey sour was solid, kinda small. Had 2
Calzone - was amazing. It was large but lightly stuffed, everything spiced and drizzled in olive oil - absolutely delcious.
Rosa pasta not our taste, we felt it was too sweet. Good consistency and presentation. Others might love it.
Mac and cheese - was INSANE, best we ever had. Got this for our daugher but we all had to split lmao.
Aroma Gourmet (dine in for lunch) - 3/5 - decent
Free bread - absolutely heavenly, hot, toasty, soft inside, love the tomato dip and spicy Mayo dip (we assume?) it comes with. I love a good bread and this one gives Noi Due a run for its money.
Mozerella sticks were solid - crispy, flavorful, breading a tad thick and reminiscent of a fish stick
Margaritta pizza - solid/average. Was great as cold pizza much later lol
Italian salad no peppers - unique, sweeter than expected, not our taste
Greek salad - it was good but very briny, over-dressed, got through it with some effort. If i had it again would order dressing on the side and add it myself
Watermelon “juice” (it’s a smoothie) (they didn’t have strawberry) literally was like drinking iced watermelons, was odd at first but kept at it and kinda grew on me
Aria (delivery for dinner) - 4/5, recommend
Expectations were low especially since it took over an hour for burgers to come, we lost our appetite before the food even arrived. But it was so good it totally revived us.
Burgers - They forgot our toppings but we decided that was a good thing bc they would’ve been soggier. We ordered them well done and they still had a bit of pink in them, which is fine, just not our preference. That said, they were excellent - loved the consistency and flavor and in particular the cilantro dip it came with (we ordered all dips) was insane and totally elevated everything.
Mcdonalds-style Shoe string fries were very good- probably amazing fresh and with a pinch of salt
Empinadas - absolutely incredible, exploding with flavor, dip these in cilantro dip or garlic aoli. Only critique is they are tiny.
Need to go back to dine-in person in a future trip to have the proper experience.
Jeffreys (dine-in for lunch) - 1/5 - overrated and skippable
Toquenos - solid
Ice coffee - excellent
Cesar salad, salmon on side - I liked the crispy salmon. But cesar dressing was way too sweet - luckily it was on side, we asked for lemon and olive oil instead, and it was just ok
Bagel CC - basic, not that good
Capreze sub - really not good- you’d think the bread would be sublime at a bakery but nah. didn't finish it.
Capreze wrap to go - fridged and when finally opened on shabbas, was soggy, old, nasty. That might be our fault
Challah to go - eggy and thick - not our favorite (prefer water / airy) but needed something
Ice cream - good, not great
Chocolate croissant - supposed to be thin buttery layers, this was thick. Not good
Service was great until it got too insane as Friday wore on
Yoss - had twice - pick up on Friday and eat on Friday night, then dine-in lunch our last day - 5/5, highly recommend
We love this place.
First of all they are very responsive and helpful on WhatsApp vs other places.
When ordering for pick up the packing was excellent
Friday night take out:
Shnitzel - very good, and came with a couple sauces (we didn’t even remember to ask for them - and we are huge sauce people) - in particular I loved the Buffalo sauce
Israeli salad - delicious, very on point when you add the pesto sauce
Lunch:
They really came through for us, we were short on time due to poor planning, we actually texted our order ahead and they made our food ready to eat in store at a specific time, on way to airport. Our hotel cab van guy waited for us and we didn’t miss a beat. We had burgers and nuggets. The meat was large and cooked perfectly and we got the variety of dipping sauces + guacamole all upon request elevated everything as well. The nuggets were crispy, fresh, white meat nuggets.
La Spezia delivery (sat night) - 4/5, recommend
Pizza excellent - better than aroma. Thin crust. Oily
Garlic bread - basically a fresh mozerella tomato pesto situation - delicious
Coffee BeanTheir sandwiches aren't good (had a tuna and also a fresh mozerella version - both times bread way too thick, and not good cold). They have something called a "crunchy salad" with 2 eggs in it which was really good.
Lula Casco (dine-in for dinner) - 3/5
Cool vibe in old town especially at night
Make a reservation - we didn’t, but got extremely lucky. Very few tables there! Lots of people after us were getting declined.
Super nice wait staff.
Hit or miss meal, next time would make better choices to improve experience.
Chicken strips - got them for our toddler it was the best thing on the menu - not sure how they made them but they were amazing.
Chicken kormah - this isn’t the same chicken kormah we were expecting, as big Indian fans. Misleading naming on their part. Wife ordered it and didn’t like it, I ended up eating it because I preferred it to my own food and found it good. Spicy and flavorful dish with a lot going on between chicken, peppers, mushrooms, other vegetables and rice
Arais pita - I was expecting beef steak in a pita but it was ground meat. Maybe I didn’t read the menu right. I had a hankering for schwarma and this wasn't it. My mistake. It wasn’t my thing
Chummus and pita was very good. 3 balls in bowl of chummus with salad and hot pita sliced into quarters
Grilled chicken pita was ok - very standard
Everything came with shoe string fries that were good
Blame Kiki (dine-in for Dinner) 5/5 - HIGHLY recommend
Wow. Just wow. This was the best dining experience we ever had. We absolutely love this place and it was the highlight of our trip.
Everything about the ambiance and decor is different, unique, beautiful, funky, fun. The food presentation is really cool - lots of things that happen at the table - for example when we ask for extra parm they bring out a giant shredder and shred this hunk of cheese right over our dish, or they serve drinks with a bubble on top that you burst into a mist, or desserts with syrup drizzled over it in front of you etc.
And absolutelty everything we ordered was delicious.
they didn’t have colipops which we wanted
We got mozza fritte - their take on mozerella sticks - delicious
Tri pasta - all amazing. Marinara, pepper and pesto. Pinch of salt and extra parm opened them all up
Drinks were all top notch incredible
Margarita (Passion fruit), signature blame Kiki (served with the bubble), and amaretto sour which was the best of the best
For dessert we got Volcano souffle - hot chocolate cake with cold vanilla ice cream and baked butter crumbs - excellent
Caramel macchiato - shot of espresso with foam so it’s tiny - the real deal, not the starbucks kind
Creamy tequila - half ice cream, half alcoholic drink - extremely intense, super delcious
And to top it all off the service was excellent. Our water was refilled without asking, new silverware replaced between courses without asking, dirty napkins replaced with clean ones without asking, all our little requests accommodated, etc
ActivitiesParque Ricardo Galindo - solid playground if you need to kill sometime with some kids. Right across from a coffee bean.
Sloth sanctuary (Gamboa Reserve): Booked by calling resort (couldn't figure out how to do it online?) Hit the UberXL lotto with Donald, spoke great English and super friendly. I asked him to come pick us up after our tour and he immediately agreed. He basically gave a free tour of the Panama Canal with history on the way. At the end I gave him $20 extra. I thought we’d text him to come back but he chose to just stay and waited for us. I can share his cell if anyone wants - highly recommend this guy to drive you around. The resort itself is beautiful with absolutely breathtaking views - would love to spend the last night here on a future stay. Bumpy ride to exhibits from resort. Butterflies, turtles, sloth. Orchids not in bloom and they showed them to us anyway lol. Overall, a little boring but weather and scenery and need to move our legs made it very enjoyable. Activity was just short enough for our 4 yr old not to lose her mind - she had a great time.
Key doh at town center mall - learned about it from a woman we met at the park on shab. $12 for all day play, in door playground. Slides, ball pit, computer screens for drawing, things like that. It was very busy (went on a Sunday) but still great way to spend a couple hours. Also was perfect because apparently it started and finished raining while we were in there. The Mall has kosher frozen yogurt under onekosher hechsher, but didn't try it (or look into that hechsher).
Casco Viejo - for us this was just a quick old town walk and Souvenir shop before ubering home after eating at Lula, not sure what other people do here - but it's a pretty cool place, a very nice night activity to walk the narrow streets with quaint little shops.
Metropolitan Natural Park I would recommend this for a family
It’s $4 adult, $2 child and you can do different kind of trails - ask how long they are and how paved they are and they can help you pick the right one. We pushed a stroller through - a little difficult but doable and worth it. We saw a pond of turtles and fed them a challah from jeffreys which was a huge highlight of our trip for our daugher. Saw a howler monkey and tons of butterfies. We loved to see animals in their natural habitat and not captivity like in US. There’s also a playground we used on the way out which was dirty except for the swings.
The rest of our activities was lazing at the pool, which is what we love!
Random:-Lots of bug spray for rainforests (gamboa reserve, metropolitan natural park, etc)
Friday traffic coming back from Gamboa isn’t fun (lots of cars go west over canal for weekend and there are only 3 bridges so they clog up)
-Panama Canal - we didn't end up going anyway but fyi the distance from panama city is actually very close. Don't put "panama canal" into google maps, you need to search for a specific visitor center lol
-Ordering food - most kosher restaurants use whatsapp to answer questions, share English menus, sometimes even let you order
-Google translate is your friend
-Getting around - yeah the driving is crazy but I'm glad we ubered more so because of spanish street signs and confusing parking. Also, the sidewalks are extremely choppy and a little annoying (but doable) to walk around Panama City if you have a stroller, just fyi
-Superkosher has everything you need, tea lights, lighters, tiny grape juices, tape for your hotels, etc etc - you really don't need to bring anything. They had some spicy dried salami circles that were delicious for snacking on shabbos, along with sub sandwhiches we made from buying baguette/deli (we were supposed to go to chabad but decided the walk was too far/hard).
One last thing: Was on fence between renting car and ubering. Honestly the crazy driving was the least of my worries, the parking seems difficult/annoying/confusing especially with all spanish road signs (obviously). After reading
@skyguy918 analysis originally and seeing how cheap Budget was ($6/day, $35 or 2.3k chase points total) I decided to rent the car and pay the $12/day at Riu (where I originally thought I was staying). BUT.. I forgot my license lol, and even though they would've given me the car with a picture of it, I didn't want to risk issues if I got pulled over. Decided to just uber around and glad we did. Spent $100-200 despite a ton of ubers (all XLs or Blacks). So it's only a little more than it would've been to rent +park. But didn't have to worry about parking in various places, our car seat wasn't an issue (no one said anything about our child sitting next to us), and we didn't have any issue coordinating the Gamboa return. In summary, I think you can go either way with this decision, do whatever you're comfortable with, both options are cheap/close, especially if you are at a hotel with free parking.