Our third day in Puerto Rico we went to Old San Juan for the day, so that allowed us to adventure a little more with the restaurants available on the island.
For breakfast we ate at the hotel again (we had a coupon-- I'm cheap, what can I say), and I decided to try the banana pancakes for breakfast with a side of berries.
Bananas and malfunctioning gallbladders, I discovered, don't go together as one would think. I was "stopped up" and could tell my tummy was struggling to digest the bananas. Which is not a fun feeling when you are climbing around old castles and whatnot. At one point I had to sit for a few minutes to rest so my stomach could get the energy it needed to finish digesting.
For lunch we went to a restaurant called Toro Salao, a tapas restaurant. It was very, very good. Trying to stick to the diet, especially after how breakfast went over, my husband and I split a whole bunch of gallbladder friendly tapas. We started with a simple salad with tomatoes and peppers with a light vinaigrette dressing.
Then we had some marinated olives, which were so tasty my mouth is watering just talking about them. But really, how can you go wrong with Spanish olives? Seriously?
For the main course we had a seared halibut with a mango salsa and bacon topping on a bed of avocado mash. It was soooooo good. The halibut was cooked perfect (minus the one piece that smelled a bit fishy), and the mango salsa and avocado mash went with it quite well.
Unfortunately, that didn't fill us up, so we ended up ordering a vegetarian sandwich too. It was good, but they left off the shitake mushrooms and shoestring sweet potatoes that were supposed to be on it, so I'm sure it could have been better.
The hotel had a cocktail reception that we were invited to, so we had quite a few glasses of wine on the hotel before going to dinner. However, at the reception we met the hotel's catering manager and he was able to recommend some restaurants to us that would be accommodating to my dietary restrictions (he himself is allergic to shellfish, so he understood). For dinner we went to the local restaurant he recommended, Barlovento. It was a casual outdoor cafe, and while they did have things on the menu I could eat, the waitstaff was not as bilingual as I needed to communicate my food allergies. We ended up getting some really good calamari (not on the gallbladder diet list, being that it's deep fried, but it I ate it anyway), and I ordered a nice salad for my main dish. It had mango in it and the dressing had a nice saltiness to it that I quite enjoyed.
I also decided that since coconuts are on the list of gallbladder friendly foods it would be perfectly acceptable to drink a pina colada. Very good.
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