Cala rotja

As someone who has been coming on family holidays to Canyamel for well over 20 years I have a pretty good knowledge of restaurants in the area and would start by saying that this used to be a restaurant offering good food at fair prices in a beautiful setting. Although the restaurant is still in a beautiful setting unfortunately following its latest menu revamp prices have been jacked up by at least 35% on last year's prices to now utterly crazed levels and the quality of the food has at the same time got worse and not better while the choice of dishes on offer has also been greatly reduced.

In addition to all of the above points on our last visit the staff at the restaurant made a quite extraordinary and unashamed effort to rip us off as though we were just dumb touristas who would simply take it and not stand up for our rights and seemed surprised when we called them to account for it and to only charge us for what we had ordered. There were only three of us and we only ordered three main courses but by processes completely unfathomable the waitress managed to transform an order from the menu for Sea Bream at 15 Euros (surely enough to pay for a main course) in to an order for a so called "special" sea food platter at 30 Euros and also transformed an order for gratinated scallops at 11 Euros in to one for Scallops with ham and asparagus at 14 Euros. The latter might have been just explicable but there is no resemblance between the word sea bream and gambas and nobody could possibly accidentally order a special costing 30 Euros on a menu where the highest published price for any item is 20 Euros. And no restuarant with a highest normal priced item of 20 Euros could responsibly have a special costing 30 Euros without making it completely clear to customers that was the price of the item when they ordered.

In summary this restaurant now only serves not very good food at now completely extortionate prices (the cheapest main course is 15 Euros and the cheapest starter about 8 Euros) and is going the same way as many other similar establishments in Mallorca in wrongly imagining that it is entitled to make as much profit as it did 10 years ago from the much smaller number of tourists now still prepared to come to Mallorca and be ripped off.

My experience at this restaurant today is symptomatic of everything that is going wrong with Mallorca in terms of cynical complacent locals who don't understand that they are strangling the goose that lays the golden egg and that the only way they will continue to have any tourist industry at all is to have one that only generates half the income it did before (because 50% less people are now visiting the island). If they continue to try to charge the 50% of their regulars who remain loyal to the island 150% above the prices they formerly charged before the Euro was launched then they soon won't have any tourist industry left at all.

Unfortunately they still don't seem to get it so sadly I suspect that this is what will ultimately happen to Cala Rotja and most of the rest of the now excessively greedy Mallorcan restaurant sector.