Morena Restaurant & Lounge

the place is good to go dance with latin friends. bad acoustic and very dark.

This place has a serious identity crisis!!!
We came in late on a Saturday night to grab a bite to eat and a couple of drinks. First of all, this place is DARK. Very difficult to see your menu or even your food when it comes! They also had a DJ playing 10 second snippets of 80’s music which corresponded to the videos they were playing on the flat screen TVs. So yes, it was also LOUD.
We ended up ordering only appetizers since we didn’t find any of the entrees appetizing, plus each entrée came with an appetizer which was too much food for us at that hour. Judging by the name of the restaurant, Morena, we were expecting Cuban or Latin cuisine but it was more of a mix of Italian and American food. We ordered the mussels in white sauce appetizer (assured by the waiter that this was one of his favorites). Well, this waiter either lied or has bad taste. The mussels weren’t fresh, lacked the usual plumpness, also needed to be cleaned better (hate to bite down and get that grittiness!). We also ordered the fried calamari. This was a pleasant surprise! It was actually one of the best calamari we have had. It was lightly fried, not greasy. The red bell peppers & banana peppers in the dish really made it shine. Both entrée sizes were large so are best for sharing.
We also had a couple of drinks. I, the lychee martinee which wasn’t very good. Didn’t taste like the usual lychee martinees I’ve had. I don’t know why it was pink. The BF had the Caipirrinha which was so bad, he didn’t finish it!
Our server was friendly and service was fast initially. During the course of our dinner though, the music got louder & louder. The restaurant started turning into a club and our waiter became hard to find. We couldn’t wait to get out of there! Luckily, we had a $ 50 gift certificate that covered our tab.
Needless to say, I will never come back to this place. Morena, you are either a club or a restaurant… make up your mind. I suggest you avoid this place too!

Once again I find myself torn between doing the right thing And sparing others feelings. Fortunately, I have learned that we are always better off when We are able to constructively express our disappointment and share with someone what others consciously know, but are afraid of expressing, and conversely much better off when we are capable of receiving such criticism and using it to improve ourselves and our end goals. In the end, we can not be afraid, for this fear ultimately serves as the demise of an others hard work and perhaps poorly planned long term ambition and dream. So enters Morena…
Struggling in it’s quest to establish some sort of identity in the sordid land of South Beach, it is currently in the state of purgatory, as it awaits final judgment on exactly what is to become of it as it struggles to survive on a weekly basis. For starters, our party showed up and was promptly seated, but it was about 25 mins before anyone offered us a drink menu, or even cared to see if the table could use some water. As a restaurant, it’s trying and failing horribly on it’s quest to serve food. Even with the limited menu it currently offers, unfortunately, it just doesn’t have the talent in the kitchen to execute any of it. The result, is a sub-​par dining experience, leaving you with feeling you would have been better off spending ¹⁄₁₀^th of what you spent on dinner, had you just gone to the BK Whopper bar a few blocks down, or any of the walk in substandard pizza shops that litter the streets of south beach. In fact, if there is any suggestion I can make, it’s that if you do happen to have to meet anyone here, do yourself a favor and grab a bite before you get there.
I can’t remember the last time I wrote a review and had nothing positive to say about the food, but it’s very difficult to write anything positive when you pay $ 50 for a meal you were only able to take 4 bites out of before you just had to get up to wash your mouth out in the restroom. The worst part is that I couldn’t have sent any of it back for anything else, because I was able to try about 5 different dishes ordered at my table, and they were all BAD!!! To top it off, as they’re serving us this food, the DJ turned on the mini spot lights and flashed them in our faces because there was some alley cat who was about to belch a performance hardly worthy of anything more than a high school auditorium performance, and the lights were part of ‘the show.’ When asked if they could turn them down, she looked at me, and turned her head as though i wasn’t even speaking to her. It was 4 requests and 10 mins later before the manager was available to ask the DJs to turn the lights down.
After dinner is done, the place transforms into a club. They have a resident dj, who is pretty good, but good luck at the bar, no matter what you order, if you ask for a splash, it will go unrecognized. The bar tender will give you equal parts in the drink, so be safe and order a hard alcohol drink to get your money’s worth, or you’ll be drinking diluted cocktails all night.
Yet another one to file under the ‘wtf? r u serious?!’ file.