Nuevo Vallarta resort supermarket prices: 125 pesos for a small Häagen-Dazs, 585 for a bottle of wine
The third day of our stay in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico — Wednesday 8 July 2026 — was a shopping day. The day before that we had not left the room at all, which is what jet lag does to us. So we walked over to the shops in the middle of the resort to buy the evening’s drinking food, and while we were in there we went up and down the aisles reading price tags.
The bill for the whole day came to 2,255.85 pesos, about $132 at 17 pesos to the US dollar, the rate we checked on 19 August 2026. That bought two salads sold by weight, chicken wings, chicken nuggets, three bottles of wine and one savoury crepe. Everything went on the room.
If you are staying somewhere like this and thinking about eating in your room instead of paying restaurant prices every night, here is what the shelves actually say.
The shop is called La Plaza and it is a walk across the grounds
La Plaza is the shopping building in the middle of the Vidanta complex. We get there on the wooden boardwalk that runs along the pond. On the ground floor there is a supermarket, Mercado Gourmet, and a place called Sweet Paris; Taco Break is upstairs on the third floor. The supermarket has a prepared-food counter, which is the part that matters to us.
One other thing happened that morning. We had already turned down an invitation to a sales meeting, and a reply was waiting for us: they had talked to a manager, found someone who speaks Japanese, and would we please meet that person instead. Those meetings eat a lot of time, and one of us finds eating breakfast with strangers genuinely stressful. The answer went back as a flat no.
What the supermarket charges
The first thing that caught our eye was the Häagen-Dazs freezer.
A 100 ml cup of Häagen-Dazs is 125 pesos, about $7. On the same shelf, the 473 ml tub is 358. It is the little cup that hurts.
Then the snack aisle, which we photographed tag by tag.
| Seen 8 July 2026 | Pesos |
|---|---|
| Häagen-Dazs, 100 ml | 125 |
| Häagen-Dazs, 473 ml | 358 |
| Sabritas potato chips | 78 |
| Cheetos | 93 |
| Ruffles, cheese | 96 |
| Pringles, 124 g | 64 |
| Pringles, 141 g | 89 |
For scale: at this same shop a can of Corona is 33 pesos and a five-litre bottle of water is 54, both from our own receipts across 7 to 24 July 2026. So a bag of chips costs more than two beers. Nothing from those snack shelves is on our receipt.
Wine: the cheapest red is over 500, and then there is the 3x2 corner
Bottled wine here gets dearer year by year. On earlier stays we were buying bottles at around 300 pesos, saying that 300 was already a fair bit and drinking them anyway. This time the cheapest red on the shelf was over 500.
Looking for something cheaper, we found a corner running 3x2: buy three, pay for two. The white we picked up there was 585 pesos a bottle, about $34 on its own, which is not what anyone would call cheap wine. But three bottles for the price of two works out at just under 392 a bottle, about $23, and that was the cheapest wine we found inside the complex.
We took two whites and one rosé, all Señorío de Sarría, the label we keep coming back to here. The receipt is the funny part. The two whites came through at 585 each. The third bottle, the rosé, came through at 5.85 pesos: a 99 per cent discount rather than a free bottle. Someone decided the till should keep one per cent of the number.
The prepared-food counter, sold by the kilo
The salads are priced by the kilo, so what you pay depends on how much goes into the box. We took 0.350 kg of seaweed salad at 750 a kilo, which came to 262.50, and 0.450 kg of a shrimp salad at 550 a kilo, 247.50.
We also took chicken wings and, because the customer in front of us bought some and we got curious, a box of chicken nuggets. On the receipt the wings are two units of the same 175-peso line, 350 in total, and the nuggets seem to have been folded into that same item — so we cannot tell you what the nuggets cost on their own.
We ordered a savoury crepe without knowing it was a crêperie
Sweet Paris is on the same ground floor, and at the time we had no idea it was a crepe shop. We read the menu, saw a savoury column, and ordered a chicken Alfredo, expecting some sort of chicken-and-cheese dish. Savoury, it turns out, meant savoury crepe.
It cost 220 pesos, about $13. For this resort that is a modest number.
The chain is not French, either: Sweet Paris started in Houston, the first shop opening in May 2012 near Rice University, run by two founders who were 26 at the time and had put together more than a hundred crepe recipes while travelling. The Paris in the name comes from one of them studying there. In Mexico it exists only as two shops in this resort group.
Back in the room
Our supermarket receipt is stamped 14:46 and the Sweet Paris one 14:54, so this was an early-afternoon shop, and we started in on it as soon as we were back in the room.
We started on Corona and left the white wine unopened, because at those prices it is being saved for something.
The seaweed salad was good. My wife’s verdict: this seaweed salad tastes exactly the same wherever you eat it. She is right — Hawaii, Japan, here, always that flavour. Seaweed and Corona together did turn slightly fishy, so she squeezed a lot of lime into the beer, and the fishiness went away.
The tortilla chips were left over from the guacamole that came with yesterday’s room service. Salt we had brought from home, lime squeezed over the top, and that is a decent drinking snack on its own. We learned it long ago from a guide on one of the rare occasions we did an optional tour in Mexico.
The nuggets went in the microwave and came out with the ketchup left over from yesterday’s pizza. My wife did not look impressed. The other one of us tried them and agreed: not very good, a bit floury. We agreed we did not need to buy those again.
The wings came under a red sauce that looks like buffalo sauce and is not very hot — closer to barbecue, with a flavour of its own. “The ketchup comes through strongly,” my wife said. Yesterday’s wings from room service tasted similar, or similar with something else going on — we could not decide. The chicken here is small either way, small enough that we said so out loud. Neither plate was a buffalo wing as we understand the term.
Then the shrimp salad: shrimp marinated in something creamy with vegetables through it, a good flavour, and plenty of shrimp in the box. “This one’s good. We’ll buy it again,” my wife said.
The crepe went last. Its side salad had already been eaten early on, so what was left was the crepe itself, reheated and cut with a knife. “Tasty,” said my wife. It is full of mushrooms, the mushrooms smell strongly, and the cheese and chicken sit well with them. It disappeared quickly, and there is a decent amount of it for 220 pesos. There were plenty of other fillings on that menu, so the next one will be a different flavour.
What the day cost
| Line | Pesos |
|---|---|
| Seaweed salad, 0.350 kg at 750 a kilo | 262.50 |
| Shrimp salad, 0.450 kg at 550 a kilo | 247.50 |
| Chicken wings, 2 at 175 (nuggets folded into the same line) | 350.00 |
| White wine, Señorío de Sarría, 2 at 585 | 1,170.00 |
| Rosé, Señorío de Sarría, 585 less 99 per cent | 5.85 |
| Supermarket subtotal | 2,615.00 |
| 3x2 discount | −579.15 |
| Mercado Gourmet total | 2,035.85 |
| Sweet Paris, chicken Alfredo crepe | 220.00 |
| Day total | 2,255.85 |
Three bottles of wine inside that came to 1,175.85, so the drink was more than half the day.
What we would buy again
The shrimp salad, yes. The crepe, yes, and a different filling next time. The nuggets, no. And wine out of the 3x2 corner: we used to think 300 pesos was a lot for a bottle here, 585 is a good deal more than that, and just under 392 is the number that put three bottles in the basket.
The ice cream stayed in the freezer.
Practical bits
- Where: La Plaza, the shopping building in the middle of the resort grounds. Mercado Gourmet and Sweet Paris on the ground floor, Taco Break on the third.
- Paying: both places went straight onto the room. The Sweet Paris menu says no cash — you sign.
- Hours: the Sweet Paris menu footer read 7:00 am to 10:45 pm when we saw it on 8 July 2026. Supermarket hours we didn’t check.
- Language: the Sweet Paris menu we photographed that day had Spanish and English side by side, and the ice cream shelf tag was in both. Whether the staff speak English we didn’t check.
- Reheating: our room has a microwave, which is the whole reason the deli counter works for us.
- Delivery: a grocery delivery charge of 50 pesos appears on our receipts from this stay, so they do bring it over.
- By weight: the salads are sold by the kilo, so a small box is a cheap way to try one.
- Cheaper food in the same building: we ate at Taco Break upstairs later in the stay, on 14 July 2026, and tacos on its menu ran 50 to 70 pesos each.
- Sales meetings: we were invited, we said no, and the invitation came back once more.
The white wine we bought that day stayed shut. Some evenings the beer is enough.
Facts checked 2026-08-19. Prices, hours and menus are what we saw on our visit; they change. Nothing here was sponsored or comped.
