Resort Italian restaurant in Santa Maria serving pizzas and simple dishes for all-inclusive guests. The experience is highly inconsistent, ranging from acceptable dinners to industrial food and painfully slow service. Only worth considering with very low expectations or if you don’t want to leave the hotel.
The resort Italian that divides more than pizza toppings
In Santa Maria, some restaurants tell you exactly what they are before you sit down. Aqua Italian is less clear. Italian in name, resort-based in reality, with reviews ranging from “fantastic” to “run away”. In between, a pattern that shows up more often than you’d hope.
What Aqua Italian really is
Aqua Italian is a restaurant integrated into an all-inclusive resort, mainly designed to fill a specific gap when the buffet no longer appeals or isn’t available. The concept is simple: pizzas, pasta, burgers, and easy dishes meant to be produced at volume.
This is not an independent Italian restaurant, and it doesn’t really try to be. It works more as a resort pressure valve than as a genuine dining destination.
This is where things unravel
Negative reviews are too consistent to ignore. Many describe clearly pre-made pizzas, with industrial bases, unfamiliar cheese that isn’t mozzarella, and flat, uninspiring flavour. Several guests explicitly compare them to supermarket frozen pizzas — not as praise.
Burgers, fries and non-pizza dishes don’t fare much better: dry food, cold sides and generally bland execution. Even classics like carbonara are described as little more than cream sauce with bacon.
There are, to be fair, positive experiences mentioning enjoyable dinners, attentive staff and meals that met expectations. Almost all of them share one thing: expectations firmly adjusted to the resort context.
When a place only works if you expect nothing, the problem isn’t you.
From “excellent” to “painfully slow”
Service quality swings wildly. Some guests report friendly, attentive staff constantly checking glasses and tables. Others describe grumpy servers, extreme slowness, repeated mistakes and a general sense of disorganisation — even with very few tables occupied.
A recurring theme is that the restaurant seems to operate at its own pace, one that rarely matches the customer’s hunger. And when things go wrong, fixes are not always quick.
Resort logic, fully applied
The space itself is clean, spacious and visually fine. But several details frustrate: lack of air conditioning at times, odd rules (such as requiring shirts in a poolside restaurant), and a food flow that creates absurd waiting times.
At lunchtime, some see it as an acceptable option within the resort offering. In the evening, when reservations are required, expectations rise — and so does the chance of disappointment.
UNCOMFORTABLE COMPARISONS
Several reviews do something no restaurant benefits from: they directly compare Aqua Italian to other Italian restaurants in Santa Maria, where it clearly comes out worse. When guests actively recommend going elsewhere for better food and less waiting, the message is hard to miss.
WHO DOES IT MAKE SENSE FOR?
It can work if you’re staying at the resort, don’t have many alternatives nearby, and accept that this is functional food, not Italian cooking. As a break from the buffet, with low expectations, it may do.
It’s not recommended if you’re looking for well-made pizza, efficient service or a meal you’ll remember outside “all-inclusive mode”.
PRACTICAL TIPS
– Adjust expectations from the start.
– Avoid pizza if you’re after anything authentic.
– If things feel disorganised, order the simplest dishes.
– If you can leave the resort, you’ll almost certainly eat better elsewhere.
– Don’t come in a hurry.
Italian name, emergency-dining soul
Aqua Italian isn’t an absolute disaster, but it’s far from a safe bet. It sits awkwardly between what its name suggests and what its kitchen actually delivers. In Santa Maria — where eating well isn’t hard — that gap matters more than it should.
Italy is far away. And here, sometimes, it really shows.
