Cuba - Lonely Planet [45]
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.
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Cuba imports US$2 billion worth of food a year, over half its total requirement.
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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.
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NUEVA COCINA CUBANA
For legions of taste-deprived gastronomes, Cuban cuisine has always been something of an international joke. From the empty-shelved ration shops of Centro Habana, to the depressing ubiquity of soggy cheese and ham sandwiches that seem to serve as the country’s only viable lunch option, it’s a question of less feast, more famine. But while celebrity chefs might still be in short supply in many of Cuba’s uninspiring government-run restaurants, simmering quietly on the sidelines, a whole new pot of tricks is brewing.
‘Nueva Cocina Cubana’ is a loose term used to describe a new awakening in Cuban cooking. Combining fresh innovative ingredients and exciting new flavors onto a traditional Caribbean base, the ideas have their roots in the US and owe a notable debt to celebrated Cuban-American chefs such as Douglas Rodríguez. But the real engine room of this gourmet-led food revolution lies, not in the US, but in the country’s own small clutch of congenial but vastly underrated paladares.
Legalized in 1995, Cuba’s paladares faced tough times during the dark days of the Special Period. But by the late 1990s, as tourism increased and food shortages gradually began to ease, some of the restaurants started to use their new private status to experiment and expand. One such innovator was La Guarida, a private paladar housed in a wonderfully eclectic mansion in Centro Habana. Fostering close ties with gastronomic gurus in France, Spain and the US, La Guarida’s chefs keenly absorbed passing international influences and slowly began to fuse traditional Cuban food with more exotic European and North American flavors. The results were as tasty as they were unexpected: tuna infused with sugarcane, chicken in a lemon and honey sauce, and caimanera (a fish indigenous to the Guantánamo region) pan-fried in onions and white wine. Word of the delicacies spread rapidly and, before long, big names were descending on La Guarida thick and fast in a roll call that read like a ‘who’s who’ of international celebrities: Jack Nicholson, Uma Thurman, Matt Dillon, Queen Sofía of Spain, plus a plethora of US congressmen; soon it wasn’t a question of whether