The Cuban

We arrived early Sunday evening after a weekend at the seaside so were looking for something interesting to eat on the way home — Cuban food certainly fitted the bill. The restaurant is vast and was fairly empty at 6pm.
When we said we’d be visiting Cuba later this year, the waitress (Italian) was first to point out that the food was nothing like Cuban food, more of a mishmash of ideas. My husband also asked what was the best lager — Alhambra she said — at £5.50 a bottle (plus 10% service), it was certainly best for her and the restaurant!
After ordering, we thought it was strange that our food arrived so very quickly — only to find that a change of staff meant that they’d brought us someone else’s food! Their order wasn’t that similar to our order, but it was food we didn’t really know, and we vaguely recognised it as ours! We were tired from our weekend, so took the food without question. Only when we started eating only to question what it was — various dietary requirements made it quite clear it wasn’t ours!
My cousin found the tapas were interesting enough — I had the Mojo Kebabs, which was extremely spicy and my veggie husband went for the Patacon Con Todos — quite a bland plantain dish, according to him — there wasn’t that much to offer veggies on the menu, he commented. The plantain was generally very chewy and a little tasteless.
To be honest, after the mix up, I do think they could have taken the service charge off, but we were tired and just wanted to leave as we still had quite a distance to cover to get home.
Not sure we’ll return that quickly — there is such a wide variety of choice in the Watershed area.

Not that great place honestly. Menu is small not much options to choose and they are pretty expensive. Tables are so close to each other sometimes u bump into others when u wanna move.

I have been to Cuba and I have been to The Cuban.
The former has taste, while unfortunately the latter does not and that made me sad as I liked the look of the Cuban and the décor and it bought back good memories of the former.
In Cuba my mouth was constantly encountering wonderful and exotic tastes.
In The Cuban my brain thought my tongue wasn’t functioning.
My brain was like ‘hello tongue are you there… what’s happening… why are you not tasting?’ and my tongue had no answer. (silence…)
Brain ‘It’s OK tongue I’ve got a plan… arms grab that bottle of Tabasco’ as my taste buds finally fired as I poured a large part of a bottle of Tabasco on my Patacon con Todo. This resolved both problems, the lack of any taste in the chilli beef and the Plantains that had been left in a dessert and stripped of all moisture.
And OK the sea bass had some taste to it but that just left stomach complaining ‘Where’s the rest of the meal?’ about the meagre amounts of rice and bass.
And so I mentioned the ‘Patacon con Todo’ to the waiter, but there wasn’t any apologies or any attempt to make it up and that made the experience the worse.