Paladar Dona Carmela, Havana, Cuba

If you’re visiting Cuba, then let me tell you a few things.

1. They don’t have half the luxuries that we have on this side of the world, most importantly – WiFi! They’ll laugh at you if you walk into a restaurant and ask if they have WiFi, so just presume they don’t have it! As their answer will be ‘If Kim Kardashian came here and lived without WiFi, then so can you!’. Trust me, I got tired of hearing that response after the 5th time I walked into a random restaurant and asked them for it.
2. Finding Vegetarian food is literally a ‘needle in a haystack’ situation, let alone Halal food! There’s literally such a small population of Muslims in the country, that when we visited the mosque – the Imam didn’t even turn up at prayer time, i’m guessing because of how little Muslims there are in the area!
3. Life here evolves around Sausages and Alcohol, I kid you not – these guys love their sausages! They have 24-kiosks dotted around the city, that literally serve Sausage with a bun. My point here is – make it clear that you don’t drink Alcohol and don’t eat meat to them from the start of every meal, so that you don’t risk them accidentally bringing you some. “Sin” is the Spanish word for ‘without’, and as you’ll soon notice, this will become your favourite word while in Cuba. “Sin Alcohol, y Sin meat” was how we greeted every restaurant that we entered, because we didn’t know what the Spanish word for Meat was – so if you find out, add it in and say it to everyone that you meat (see what I did there?).

 

The point I’m trying to emphasize to you is that – you won’t have a phone to Google ‘nice places to eat in Cuba’ when you’re there, so have a list of places ready before you travel – something that I did before travelling, and it really saved me!

The place you see here is named Paladar Dona Carmela – not sure what that means, but it probably means something along the lines of ‘Come eat Seafood with us while our dog and the neighbours cat come and sit underneath your table and stare are you blank in the face’.

This restaurant was visited by Beyonce and Jay-Z when they visited Havana, and believe me the restaurant will make sure you get to know of it! There’s pictures of them all over the walls, and I hate to be so rude – but they probably spend more time cleaning the shrine of Beyonce than they do in their kitchen preparing food.

We tried a selection of Seafood’s, and… – to cut to the chase, don’t visit here.

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We primarily visited this restaurant because of some good reviews I had read online, or thought I had read online – but also because so many Taxi drivers recommended it to us!

To put it into context – the Lobster was black inside, I mean… I’m not fortunate to eat Lobster everyday, but I obviously didn’t even take a bite of it after seeing that. The fish was fine, but the rest of the dishes weren’t great either. They bring the dishes with an accompaniment of white rice, and a plate of black beans – I kid you not, me and my 3 friends were fighting over plain rice by the end of the meal because of how poor their main meal was.

I’m quite picky with which reviews I share, I’m mostly about finding good places and sharing them with my followers for them to check out – but this time, I had to share this so – like me, you don’t get sucked into giving this place a visit!