Food & Drink
STAPLES & SPECIALTIES
DRINKS
CELEBRATIONS
WHERE TO EAT & DRINK
VEGETARIANS & VEGANS
EATING WITH KIDS
HABITS & CUSTOMS
EAT YOUR WORDS
Veterans of WWII rationing could get flashbacks in Cuba. Remember Spam ham, vinegary vegetables, jam from a tin and gristly meat? Well, they’re all still alive and kicking in the Caribbean. But, while there’s a certain truth in the rumor that the local chickens are born fried and salad is a euphemism for ‘whatever raw thing is available,’ it’s not all rubbery fish and microwaved pizzas. Indeed, many of Cuba’s chefs can be extraordinarily creative, and the good old-fashioned home cooking in privately run paladares and casas particulares is both plentiful and delicious.
The key is to manage your expectations. Don’t arrive in Cuba assuming that you’ll find New York–standard delis or Singapore-style variety. Food culture here – or the apparent lack of it – is a direct consequence of the country’s Special Period when meat was a rare luxury and an average breakfast consisted of sugar mixed with water.
The upside of Cuban cooking is that almost everything is locally produced and organic. Cut into a fish in Havana and you can almost guarantee it was caught in Cuban waters. Slice open a sweet potato in Camagüey and chances are it was grown within about 500m of your plate with no added fertilizers.
STAPLES & SPECIALTIES
Popularly known as comida criolla (Creole food), Cuban meals use a base of congrí and meat, garnished with fried plantains (green bananas) and salad. Congrí is rice flecked with black beans (sometimes called moros y cristianos, literally ‘Moors and Christians’). Salad, meanwhile, is limited to seasonal ingredients (outside the posh hotels) and consists mostly of a triumvirate of tinned green beans, cucumber slices and/or shredded cabbage.
Protein means pork, and you’ll become well acquainted with lomo ahumado (aromatic smoked loin), chuletas (thin juicy filets) and fricasé de cerdo (pork fricassee with peppers and onions). Filete Uruguayo is a breaded, deep-fried cutlet stuffed with ham and cheese.
Chicken is readily available in Cuba, though it’s often fried to a crisp, while the pescado (fish) is variable depending on where you are. Though you’ll come across pargo (red snapper) and occasionally octopus and crab in some of the specialist seafood places, you’re more likely to see lobster or shrimp ajillo (sautéed in oil and garlic) or enchilado (in tomato sauce). Ostiones, small oysters served with tomato sauce and lime juice, are also popular. Cows are government-controlled, so beef products such as steak are only sold (legally) in state-run restaurants.
Yuca (cassava) and calabaza (pumpkinlike squash) are served with an insanely addictive sauce called mojo made from oil, garlic and bitter orange. Green beans, beets and avocados (June to August) are likely to cross your lips too.
Few restaurants do breakfast (although pastries are sold at chains such as Doña Neli and Pain de París), so stock up at a hotel buffet or arrange for your casas particulares to provide it. Most casas do huge, hearty breakfasts of eggs, toast, fresh juice, coffee and piles of fruit for CUC$2 to CUC$3.
Desserts
Cubans are aficionados of ice cream and the nuances of different flavors are heatedly debated (they even produced an Oscar-nominated movie on the subject). Coppelia’s ice cream is legendary, but ridiculously cheap tubs of other brands (440g for CUC$1) can be procured almost everywhere, and even the machine-dispensed peso stuff ain’t half bad. Walk down any Cuban street at any time of the day or night and you’ll see somebody coming to grips with a huge tub of Nestlés or enjoying a fast melting cornet. See boxed text.
Flan is baked custard with a caramel glaze served in individual portions. Cubans also make pumpkin and coconut flan of Spanish origin. Huge sickly sweet cakes are wheeled out at the smallest excuse – and usually transported around town on a wobbling bicycle first. Havana and a couple of the larger cities also have some good patisseries. The standard (and only) dessert in all cheap restaurants and Islazul hotels is the incongruous mermelada con queso (tinned jam with a slice of stale cheese). It’s as vile as it sounds!
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DRINKS
Alcoholic Drinks
Cuba’s rum cocktails are world-famous. There’s the minty mojito, the shaved-ice daiquirí and the sugary Cuba Libres (rum and Coke), to name but three. Havana Club is Cuba’s most celebrated ron (rum), with Silver Dry (the cheapest) and three-year-old Carta Blanca used for mixed drinks, while five-year-old Carta de Oro and seven-year-old Añejo are best enjoyed in a highball. Cuba’s finest rum is Matusalem Añejo Superior, brewed in Santiago de Cuba since 1872. Other top brands include Varadero, Caribbean Club and Caney (made at the old Bacardí factory in Santiago de Cuba, though the name Bacardí is anathema, as the exiled family decided to sue the Cuban government under US embargo laws). Most Cubans drink their rum straight up and, on more informal occasions, straight from the bottle.
The drink made from fermented cane is called aguardiente (fire water) and a few shots will have your eyes watering. In bodegas (stores distributing ration-card products) it’s sold as ron a granel (rum from the barrel) for about 20 pesos – bring an empty bottle. Local nicknames for this hooch include ‘drop her drawers’ and ‘train spark.’ Popular bottled brands are Santero and El Niño. Cubans also make fruit wines from mango, pineapple or raisins. Big city stores usually carry a limited selection of Spanish, Chilean and Cuban wines. Top beer brands include Mayabe (3.8% alcohol), Hatuey (5.4%) and the big two: Cristal (4.9%) and Bucanero (5.4%). Imported beers include Lagarto, Bavaria and Heineken.
Nonalcoholic Drinks
Cubans love their coffee (cafecito or café cubano) which is served strong, black and sweetened in small espresso-sized cups. Homegrown in the Escambray and Sierra Maestra Mountains, a fresh brew will be brought out as an icebreaker wherever you go, from a top-end resort bar to a wooden campesino (country) hut. Café con leche (a mixture of strong coffee and hot milk) is more of a tourist drink and is thus available in nearly all bars and hotels serving foreigners. Havana has some great coffee houses and more are being added all the time. Smaller towns have them too, though here they are usually less fancy and more local (look out for the Cubanitas chain). There isn’t much of a té (tea) culture in Cuba, but you can always get a pot of hot water at hotels or restaurants. Tea bags are sold in stores that sell items in Convertibles. If you’re fussy (or English), bring your own.
An increasing number of places can whip up a refreshing limonada (limeade). Pure jugo (fruit juice), refresco (instant-powdered drink) and batidos (fruit milkshakes) are sold in street stalls for a few pesos and are tasty and usually safe to drink. Small 250mL juice boxes with attached straws are ubiquitous in Cuba and can be bought in bars and grocery stores for 50 to 80 centavos. They come in about a dozen different flavors from orange to mango.
Guarapo is a pure sugarcane juice mixed with ice and served from quaint little roadside stalls all over Cuba. If you’re a long-distance cyclist, forget Gatorade, this is the ultimate energy drink. Prú is a special nonalcoholic brew from the Oriente made from spices, fermented yuca and secret ingredients prú-meisters won’t divulge.
Tap-water quality is variable and many Cubans have gory amoebic tales, including giardia. To be safe you can drink agua natural (bottled water), but that gets expensive over longer trips. You can also boil it (the local method) or buy bottled chlorine drops called Gotica. Available in most stores that sell products in Convertibles for CUC$1.25, one drop makes 3L of drinkable water; this works well in the provinces, but in Havana it’s better to boil or buy bottled water. Don’t touch the water in Santiago, even to brush your teeth. It’s famously dirty – and brown!
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CELEBRATIONS
New Year’s Eve, birthdays, family reunions, weddings: whatever the reason, big events are celebrated with lechón asado (roast pork). As much about the process and camaraderie as the food, a pig roast is a communal effort where the jokes fly, the rum flows and dancing or dominó is de rigueur. Once the pig is killed, cleaned and seasoned, it’s slowly pit-roasted over a charcoal fire. Traditional sides include yuca con mojo (yuca with garlic and lime sauce), congrí and salad.
Pig roast is also the street food of choice for the regular fiestas that enliven numerous Cuban towns at weekends, especially in the Oriente. Classic examples can be observed (and tasted) in Bayamo, Manzanillo, Guantánamo, Ciego de Ávila and other towns.
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WHERE TO EAT & DRINK
State-Run Restaurants
Restaurant opening hours are generally 11am to 11pm daily, although staff sometimes drift off for lunch unannounced, or will be too busy counting stock to serve you right away. Government-run restaurants take either Cuban pesos or Convertibles. Peso restaurants are notorious for handing you a nine-page menu (in Spanish), when the only thing available is fried chicken. Obviously, you’re supposed to pick up this information via telepathy because you’ll sit for half an hour or more before learning this while the waitress falls asleep, wakes up, takes a phone call, files her nails, wipes the bar with a dirty cloth and falls asleep again. But it’s not all pain and stomachache. Some peso restaurants are quite good; all are absurdly cheap and they’re often your only option off the tourist circuit, so don’t discount them altogether (Doña Yulla is a nationwide chain to look out for). Sometimes workers in peso restaurants either won’t show you the menu in an effort to overcharge you, or they will charge Convertibles at a one-to-one ratio – making the food ridiculously overpriced. Verify before you order that you’re looking at peso prices (meals will be in the 15- to 25-peso range). Some peso restaurants have one menu in Convertibles at a reasonable rate and another in pesos.
Restaurants that sell food in Convertibles are generally more reliable, but this isn’t capitalism: just because you’re paying more doesn’t necessarily mean better service. In fact, after a week or two roaming the streets of Cuba’s untouristed provincial towns in search of a decent meal, you’ll quickly realize that Cuban restaurants are the Achilles’ heel of the socialist revolution. Food is often limp and unappetizing and discourses with bored and disinterested waiters worthy of something out of a Monty Python sketch (‘we can’t do you a cheese sandwich, but we can do you a cheese and ham sandwich’). There are a few highlights in an otherwise dull field. The Palmares group runs a wide variety of excellent restaurants countrywide, from a small shabby hut on Maguana beach, Baracoa, to the New York Times–lauded El Aljibe in Miramar, Havana. Another safe, if uninspiring certainty is El Rápido, the Cuban version of McDonald’s, which offers a generic menu of microwaved pizzas, hot dogs, sandwiches and – sometimes – excellent yogurt. Cuba would do well to open more La Vicarias, where the service is uniformly good, the prices fair and the food palatable. Havana is, of course, a different ballpark, with many state-run restaurants in Habana Vieja and Miramar of excellent quality. All state-run restaurant employees earn the standard CUC$8 to CUC$13 a month, so tips are highly appreciated (see boxed text,).
Paladares
Paladares are small family-run restaurants that are permitted to operate privately on the payment of a monthly tax to the government. First established in 1995 during the economic chaos of the Special Period, paladares owe much of their success to the sharp increase in tourist traffic on the island, coupled with the bold experimentation of the local chefs who, despite a paucity of decent ingredients, have heroically managed to keep the age-old traditions of Cuban cooking alive.
Legally, paladares are only supposed to offer 12 seats and are prohibited from selling lobster, beef or shrimps (which are a government monopoly). The reality, however, is often rather different. Through secrecy, guile or a surreptitious bending of the rules, many paladares pack well over a dozen people into carefully concealed dining rooms or romantically lit back gardens and, with meal prices hovering in the CUC$15 to CUC$20 bracket, make enough to scrape by.
Although the atmosphere between different paladares can differ significantly, the food is almost always of a superior quality to the rations offered elsewhere. Indeed, following big reviews in the New York Times, the Guardian and Cigar Aficionado magazine, leading Havana paladares such as La Guarida, La Cocina de Lilliam and La Fontana have managed to attract international attention (see boxed text,).
To allow readers to easily distinguish between private and state-run restaurants, in this book all privately operated eateries are listed as paladares. Whenever we refer to a ‘restaurant,’ it means it’s a government-operated place.
Quick Eats
Like all private industry, cafeterías (street stalls) are government-regulated so – although they might look a bit grungy – hygiene isn’t usually a problem. Cuban street pizza, with its pungent cheese and occasional glob of tomato, is surprisingly good and became the new national dish during the Special Period. Good standards on the street dining scene include batidos, asado (roasted) or breaded pork-cutlet sandwiches, fruit cocktails and ice cream. There’s also a whole category of pan con… (bread with…) – whatever can be put inside bread, from tortilla (tasty eggs) to pasta (a greasy mayonnaise substance).
Keep an eye out for stalls and windows with comida criolla signs. These places sell cajitas (literally ‘little boxes’): full meals of salad, baked vegetables, congrí and pork cutlets that are sold in little take-out boxes with a cardboard spoon cutout on the lid for CUC$1.
Cuban fast-food chains El Rápido and Pollo make McDonald’s look like a health-food store and are best avoided unless you are suffering from exceedingly severe hunger pangs.
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VEGETARIANS & VEGANS
In a land of rationing and food shortages, strict vegetarians (ie no lard, no meat bullion, no fish) will have a hard time. Cubans don’t really understand vegetarianism and, when they do (or when they say they do), it can be summarized rather adroitly in one key word: omelette – or, at a stretch, scrambled eggs. The other problem is preparation. Even if your omelette has no meat in it, don’t assume that it has been prepared in a manner that is in any way sympathetic to vegetarian requirements. Indeed, Cubans often interpret vegetarianism as ‘no meat chunks in the soup.’ The solution: pick out the offending items out just before serving. Thankfully change is on the horizon. The opening of a handful of new vegetarian restaurants in Havana has coincided with a nationwide educational campaign about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. Furthermore, cooks in casas particulares who may already have had experience cooking meatless dishes for other travelers are usually more than happy to accommodate vegetarians; just ask.
Vegans have little choice but to cook for themselves. Many people rent rooms with kitchen privileges or entire self-sufficient apartments. It’s not easy, but like all things in Cuba, it’s possible. Other options for serious vegans and/or vegetarians:
- Agropecuarios Vegetable markets; also sell rice, beans, fruit (for a list of Havana’s best markets, Click here).
- Organopónicos Organic vegetable markets.
- Proteina vegetal Dried soy protein (sold in bodegas).
- Spirulina Spirulina powder (an aquatic plant offering high protein and vitamins).
- Yogurt de soya Soy yogurt (sold in bodegas; regular yogurt is sold in stores that sell goods in Convertibles).
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EATING WITH KIDS
With a dearth of exotic spices and an emphasis on good, plain, nonfancy food, kids in Cuba are often surprisingly well accommodated. The family-orientated nature of life on the island certainly helps. Few eating establishments turn away children, and waiters and waitresses in most cafes and restaurants will, more often than not, dote on your boisterous young offspring and go out of their way to try to accommodate their unadventurous childish tastes. Rice and beans are good staples and chicken and fish are relatively reliable sources of protein. The main lacking ingredient – though your kid probably won’t think so – is a regular supply of fresh vegetables. Consider bringing a vitamin supplement, as the paltry cabbage and cucumber salads that pass for spring greens in many Cuban restaurants will challenge even the most mature palates.
Cuba’s ubiquitous range of tropical fruit juices available in small cartons with an attached straw are a big hit with kids and come in a dozen different flavors. Even better is raw fruit, a staple at Cuban breakfast tables with delicious plates of chopped banana, papaya, pineapple and orange on offer at most casas particulares (where it’s always incredibly fresh). For a treat, hit the ice-cream stores which are evident in even the smallest towns and always riotously popular.
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HABITS & CUSTOMS
Food culture in Cuba is another oxymoron. It’s as if the population reserves all its gusto for producing rum, rolling cigars and creating innovative music, and has no energy left afterwards for anything but rice and beans. Rationing and the Special Period have obviously done their damage, and a quick glance around the exile community in the US does, at least, prove that Cuban cooks can actually cook, given the right freedom and ingredients.
Mealtimes in Cuba aren’t the long drawn-out social occasions so common in Europe and North America, and people rarely have the inclination to sit down and quaff wine or discuss the merits of Dolcelatte over Camembert. Eating, rather, is seen as a basic necessity – and a hastily undertaken one at that – that acts as a prelude to drinking, music or some other more exciting form of nighttime entertainment.
The speed at which Cubans eat is famous. Hit an all-you-can-eat buffet in a Cuban-patronized hotel and the first rule of thumb is ‘move quickly,’ or the food will all be gone in an eye blink. À la carte restaurants are a different matter, though people rarely linger romantically. Bars are considered better places for hot dates.
Knowledge of food and food culture is equally thin. There are no Gordon Ramsays or Rachel Rays in Cuba, and don’t expect your less-than-eager waiter in a government-run restaurant to know or care about the nuances of what the chef might be secretly concocting.
Cubans love to snack and eat a lot on the go in roughshod streetside peso stalls, often standing up. Change up some coins in the Cadeca and feel free to join them.
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EAT YOUR WORDS
Managing a menu in Spanish, making special requests or maneuvering a meal in pesos – your eating options will expand if you can speak the local language. For pronunciation guidelines see the Language chapter, Click here.
Useful Phrases
Menu Decoder
Food Glossary
FRUTAS (FRUITS)
VERDURAS (VEGETABLES)
ENSALADA (SALAD)
CARNE (MEAT)
PESCADO & MARISCOS (FISH & SHELLFISH)
POSTRES (DESSERTS)
COMIDA EN LA CALLE (SNACKS & STREET FOOD)
TéCNICAS (COOKING TECHNIQUES)
