First, let me complain that my desk in this room at this brand-new luxury resort is too high. My shoulders are already starting to seize, so this should be a brief post.

I know I shouldn’t complain at all. I travel along the most beautiful stretch of beach in Mexico and visit the nicest hotels. Everyone tells me what a fabulous job I have. And I gently remind them that I have to stay at the crappy places as well, and eat at the crappy restaurants.

Which brings me to this evening’s topic.

I feel ill. I feel like perhaps my best course of action would be vomiting before bed, then getting a fresh start in the morning.

This of course isn’t how Miguel, the dining room manager at this resort where the desks are too high (or the chairs too low?), would want me to feel. And he did pointedly ask if there was something wrong with my pasta. But I couldn’t tell him what I was really thinking, because it would have taken too long.

So, lucky you. Here’s what happened:

Course one: three Baja California oysters. Turns out Baja isn’t known for its oysters. Plus, there was a little chunk of iceberg lettuce mixed in with one. And quite a lot of grit.

Course two: a “salad” that consisted of a bundle of lettuce and cress standing vertically on my plate. Alongside were arrayed a few slices of pear, a soupcon of blue cheese and three hazelnuts. Atop it all: raspberry goo.

Course three: alleged pesto pasta with scallops. No basil in sight. Instead: mushrooms! Plus, the barest hint of cooked green pepper, just enough to trigger the old school-lunch memories.

In the background through all this: crap piano music (inside) and crap violin playing (outside on the terrace, but unfortunately audible). A simultaneously bland and cloying white wine. Not in the background: my waiter, who was pretty much nowhere to be seen at any point.

The really depressing part of all this is that this isn’t the only place this is happening. Just a couple of nights ago, Tamara was moved to say, “Huh, I guess I understand bulimia a little better now,” after we’d suffered through a meal at what’s purported to offer the finest all-inclusive dining on this coast.

So, what, are we just hateful food snobs? I don’t think so. I don’t think you need a trained palate to realize that this simulacrum of high-end dining is complete bullshit. I don’t think the elderly couple sitting in front of me on the terrace tonight–she removed his reading glasses for him while he was eating–took any particular delight in receiving their lettuce in a vertical bundle.

But there are a lot of places like this. It’s one thing to pay medium-range money to spend a week at a resort living the way you imagine rich people might (that appeared to be the target market for the place two nights ago), but it’s quite another to shell out twice as much and still get such utterly dispiriting and even hateful food as I did tonight. The two-nights-ago place served items like foie-gras ice cream, which I can’t imagine Middle America really has much taste for, or even understands the culinary lineage that brought it to their plates. The [resort name here] is to El Bulli what H&M is to Prada…or perhaps something more like Alexander McQueen.

Eating the Stupid Resort Food–usually in a dining room that’s lit very badly, with music that’s atrocious–is like eating in Bizarro Gourmetlandia. All the details are there–Michelin credentials, vast wine cellar, sleek furniture, some sort of challenging foam or savory ice cream.

But then it’s just Not Quite Right, starting with the occasional incident of bad English: “chocolate mousse souffle with an idea of Black Forest,” “Freshly Oysters.” Then it goes very, very wrong, as when Tamara noticed (fortunately, before we’d ordered it) that the house red was Citra, the heinous jug wine that Ali serves at the KC, for when we’ve drunk through everything good we’ve brought ourselves.

But I’ve also visited some really fantastically high-quality hotels that happen to have exceptional food and service, and make it all seem effortless.

So who’s to blame? Well, scale, for one: these resorts are trying to feed 400 to 800 people a night, which must require some enormous appliance called the Blanderizer. And I’ll go back to being a food snob and assert that people just don’t fucking know any better–yet they don’t even realize they don’t know, which only makes it worse. And usually they’re on some kind of group travel deal, or their company is paying or whatever, so they’re less likely to dwell on bad things. And then there are the just-plain-bad chefs who think they’re fucking awesome–all those dudes in the chili-pepper pants who are stoked to get a job on a Caribbean beach with all these hot mamacitas running around.

Basically, what I’ve learned on this trip is that real rich people live very differently from how not-rich people imagine them to. They do not require attendants in white gloves who call them “Mister” and “Missus.” They do not need absurdly thick terrycloth robes–at least not in the tropics. And they do not eat vertical lettuce.