My family and I traveled to Holguin, Cuba and stayed six days. During our six-day stay at our resort, we were able to experience a variety of different foods. I’ll admit when we first decided to go to Cuba, I thought that Cuban food would have a blast of flavour. Sadly I was mistaken, and the food is actually quite bland. Cuban food left my taste buds disappointed, and craving some flavour. Our options for food while we were there was cafeteria food, a snack bar, and different specialty foods at restaurants we had to book a reservation at.
The first night we managed to make a reservation at the Italian restaurant, I thought it would be great considering I’m a huge pasta lover. Once we got there our server sat us down, and gave us each a menu with very few options. Everyone was allowed to pick one starter, one entrée, and one dessert off the menu.
The options for starters was simple soup or salad, unlike Canada lettuce is hard to come by in Cuban food. Options for entrees was also very limited, lasagna or spaghetti. We all opted for the lasagna, because several tables near ours said their spaghetti was terrible. We were told that the dessert option, was a brownie with ice cream.
Our family are big into bread, so of course when they offered us a bun and butter with our meal we were pretty excited. It’s nothing to be excited about, the bread is good the butter is unforgivable. I wasn’t aware but the meat that they use for their spaghetti, and lasagna is sausage meat. Perhaps it’s because of personal preference, but despite it being tolerable it wasn’t that good.
Dessert was the best thing about our meal, everyone got a brownie with ice cream. Except Emilee due to her nut allergy, otherwise our first experience was okay. I was thankful we were able to avoid the cafeteria food for the night, and we ended up learning that Fanta orange pop is the popular drink down here. (It tastes identical to flat orange soda.)
The second night we managed to make reservations, at the Cuban restaurant luckily. The person in charge of booking reservations, mentioned it would be their last night opened. They were closing due to “low season” beginning, which confused me because they were planning on keeping the other restaurants open.
I was more excited to go to the Cuban food inspired restaurant, than the Italian one. I had heard people around the resort talking about the food, they said it had tons of flavour. The reservation was for 6:30pm, we got there right on time and the restaurant was just starting to open. We got seated and the server gave us each a menu, just like the previous night we were allowed one from each section.
We all ordered a water, and Shirley Temples the next tolerable drink that they serve. It turns out that all the soda tastes like flat soda, and that it’s not just the Fanta. While we waited for our food to come, they passed around from table to table serving buns and butter. The bun is actually delicious, but again the butter is unbearable. Emilee ate her bun devouring it with the butter from around the table, which makes me question her taste buds. 😛
The food they served us at the Cuban restaurant, had a lot more flavour than anything we had eaten so far at our resort. The salad was a winner in my books, and the soup was on the spicier side giving it a kick. The roasted chicken was flavorful, the rice and vegetables were delicious. For dessert we ordered the ice cream, except for mom she wanted to try out the Flan dessert which no-one ended up liking.
The Cuban food restaurant had the atmosphere, that was both peaceful and relaxing. It was the closest restaurant to the ocean, you could literally walk less than a minute and you would have your toes touching the sand. Right outside behind the restaurant, they had a bunch of stairs that lead to a viewing area sort of thing. The view from up there was incredible, you could see the trees and the ocean.
We managed to get a reservation at the “Romantic” restaurant, on our fourth night despite it being the most popular place to eat. It’s considered quite fancy, so we were told we’d have to dress up. I was concerned that it would be meant mostly for couples, but when we got there for our reservation at 6:30pm there were several families. The atmosphere was similar to being at someone’s wedding, they had the tables and chairs covered with beautiful material.
Once we got our menus, they took our drink order and gave us a minute to look at the menu. We were allowed one of each thing, just like all the previous restaurants. This time though they gave us the option of a Caesar salad, curiously I wondered if we’d be given lettuce this time around. Sure enough we were given a little bit of lettuce, honestly I was beginning to think that lettuce didn’t exist in Cuba.
The food at the Romantic restaurant, was hands down the best food we had the entire time we stayed at the resort. I said we should make reservations, to eat there every night. Unfortunately they only allow you to eat there, once a week. Yet we managed to be able to eat there, twice during our stay. It was the last place we ate supper at, before we left to come back to Canada. We celebrated my birthday supper there, since we wouldn’t be getting back home till almost midnight the next day.
The buffet cafeteria food, every meal was different and cooked by different people. One night they had a lady caramelizing different fruits, it was so good and I’m not a big fan of caramel.
Snack Bar “The Snack Shack”, was our favourite go to place to eat during non-meal hours. I personally thought that the food there, was better than the buffet. By the time it came time to leaving, we already had “regulars.” Mom and I always got the Ham sandwich toasted, with fries. Keera would order a burger with fries, then Zaden and Emilee would get the cheese pizza.
If you are traveling to expand your taste buds, I don’t recommend visiting Cuba. The reason why you should visit Cuba, is for the beautiful culture.
