Banyan Tree Mayakoba lists seventeen places to eat, which is true and not much help. Seven are fixed restaurants, two are beach clubs, one is a pool bar. Six are formats rather than rooms – a Mayan dinner over fire, a dinner for two on a flat-bottomed boat, two themed nights, a barbecue at your villa, a sunset cruise. The seventeenth is room service, quietly one of the better options.

Put like that, the decision is not which restaurant but which night. Two of the seven serve one meal a day, the adults-only beach club shuts at five, one kitchen stays open until one in the morning, and two of the destination dinners run on a single evening a week. Meanwhile the best food on the estate sells out nightly, including to people sleeping a hundred metres from it.

Two of the seven restaurants are the same room

The seven: Saffron for Thai, Suna for Nikkei until one in the morning, Cello for Italian, Tomahawk Open Fire Latin Grill for steak, Oriente for breakfast, Cocina Corazón for tacos at El Pueblito, La Copa for a drink.

Two of them are the same room. Oriente serves breakfast in it and closes at eleven; Tomahawk lights the grill in it at half past five. The property presents two restaurants and structurally it is one space used twice a day, which explains the hours and a good deal about how the steakhouse feels. La Copa, meanwhile, does more than a lobby bar usually does: the agave tasting is held there, and it is where you board the lagoon dinner.

Saffron is the one to book before you fly

Saffron sits on low wooden decks over one of the canals, and the intended way to reach it is by electric boat rather than on foot. Dinner only, seven nights. It is the best food inside the gates, and not by a little.

The lineage matters more than it usually would. The first Saffron opened at Banyan Tree Phuket in 1995 and it is now the group’s signature restaurant at fourteen properties, with a corporate chef who travels between them so that the dish you order in Mexico is the dish you would be handed in Macau. The local kitchen puts the split at roughly eighty per cent corporate recipes it must follow exactly, twenty per cent it can play with.

There is no tasting menu and no wine pairing, which at this level is unusual and is good news: you order what you want. Curries and wok dishes climb to the tenderloin at the top of the card, and the vegetarian section is a real one – seven mains, all close cousins.

Two practical notes. Saffron sells out nightly and nothing appears to be held back for guests already on the property, so booking from home is not over-planning – and when it is full the kitchen will cook to your villa, because Saffron is on the all-night room-service card. Second, it opens at half past five, on decks above standing water, in a mangrove. Take the repellent to dinner.

Breakfast is the one room everybody is in

Oriente serves from seven until eleven and that is the whole of its day. The buffet is vast – a wall of bread and pastry, a Mexican side and an American one, omelettes and pancakes to order – with a continental tier, a children’s version, and an à la carte card besides. It is also the only crowded space on a resort whose whole selling point is that nothing is crowded. Every child on the property is in there between eight and nine, the kitchen is not staffed for the volume, and a filter coffee can outlast the food.

Three ways around it. Sands Beach Club does à la carte on the sand from eight to eleven, pancakes at the bottom of the card and an acai bowl at the top. The boat dinner has a breakfast version for two. Or eat on your terrace, where in-villa sets carry a delivery charge on top: dearest of the four, and quietest. Note that Oriente opens at seven and Sands not until eight.

The two beach clubs split the day between them

Sands is the only venue doing all three meals. Lunch is poke bowls, pizzas and tacos, with a lobster roll at the top of the card. Dinner is a different proposition – the kitchen sets up a seafood market and cooks what you point at – running from lobster tacos to a 300-gram beef tenderloin, the dearest single plate on the property and dearer than anything at the signature restaurant.

Sur is the only adults-only dining space here, eleven until five and no dinner at all. That is the useful shape of the day: Sur takes the quiet lunch, Sands takes the children and the evening. It also means only these two and the barbecues on the sand are exposed to the sargassum that reaches this coast from late spring into early autumn. Everything else is lagoon-side or in the village.

The dinners that only happen if enough people book

Six of the seventeen listings are events rather than rooms, and several need a minimum number of diners. If the numbers are not there, the evening does not run. Haab is the headline: a multi-course Mayan dinner in the open air, wines and spirits harmonised into the set menu, song and dance through it. It goes on request rather than on a fixed night, and it can be pulled on the day for want of sign-ups – repeatedly, even in high season. Book it early and hold it loosely. Latin Beach BBQ, on Wednesdays, has the same problem; Mexican Night is Saturdays, mariachi and antojitos.

Ixchel does not depend on anyone else turning up, because it is private. You board a trajinera at the lobby dock after a cocktail at La Copa and drift the lagoons for about two hours, a captain and a chef aboard, working from one of three menus you choose in advance. Take the Thai: Saffron’s kitchen cooks it. A bottle of wine comes with it. Of everything here, it is the thing I would book twice. The Signature In-Villa BBQ and the Sunset Cruise are email bookings rather than WhatsApp.

One flat statement, because it matters more than an estimate would: the property publishes no terms for any of the six, nor for the cooking classes or the tastings — get the details in writing first.

The boat to the other three hotels stops at seven

Mayakoba is four hotels – Alila, Banyan Tree, Fairmont, which opened first in 2006, and Rosewood – on one gated estate of some 600 acres, and every one of their restaurants is open to every one of their guests. That is a destination-level policy, not a courtesy a single hotel extends. Getting there is by boat, golf cart, bicycle or on foot. Rosewood’s Zapote is a serious cocktail bar with Mediterranean small plates; Fairmont has El Puerto and La Laguna.

But the boats stop at seven, and that single fact reorganises the idea. Arriving at another hotel’s restaurant by water at dusk, the version everyone pictures, exists only for the early sitting: book half past five and the canal takes you both ways; book eight and you go home in a golf cart, which is fine and is not the same evening. And if you are coming from outside the gates, the booking has to be in the gatehouse’s system, not merely in your inbox.

The counter-argument

The problem with eating here is not the cooking at the top. It is everything underneath it, and it is the drinks. Start with the steakhouse, the clearest case. Tomahawk is a grill concept working out of the breakfast room and it shows: no atmosphere of its own, tables that feel like tables put somewhere rather than a restaurant, and a headline product that is not good enough. The cut arrives tough and, more damningly, essentially unseasoned. The bread and the empanadas are the best things on the table, which is not a compliment at a place named after a cut of beef. Skip it.

Two irritations: every menu is a QR code with no printed card anywhere, and fish listed on the beach-club card is often unavailable.

The largest objection is the hardest to answer. This is a heritage-rich stretch of Mexico and the best restaurant on the property is Thai, with the Mexican register carried by a lunch room and a bar. The Asian identity is genuine and well executed, and it is also why a week here can feel oddly untethered from the country you flew to. The fix is not on this property. It is a free boat away, and it leaves at seven.

Know before you go

Booking is not one system but three: Saffron, Cello, Tomahawk and Sands take online reservations, every other venue is WhatsApp only, and the in-villa barbecue and the sunset cruise are email. Dietary requirements are handled well but on a clock – vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, halal and kosher meals are all available with at least twenty-four hours’ notice, arranged through the concierge rather than at the table. There is no kosher restaurant here; it is a meal request, and the notice is the whole of the requirement. Dress is resort casual by day, and after dark the rule at the dinner restaurants is no beach shorts and no flip-flops.

Two timing notes to finish. The hotel states that its restaurants run to seasonality and hours can change without notice, so confirm anything you are building a night around on the day, not the month before. And the venues are open to people not staying here, provided the reservation is confirmed – part of why the best table on this estate is gone by the time you land.

See the full set: Banyan Tree, Mayakoba — in frames. More Mayakoba: the Mayakoba set.

Book Saffron from home, keep breakfast early, and let the lagoon run the evenings.