La Guarida, HavanaLa Guarida
- Best time
- Dinner, booked ahead — a drink on the roof first
- Getting there
- Centro Habana, a short taxi ride from Old Havana; the way in is up a grand, half-ruined staircase
Why it’s in the log
La Guarida opened in 1996 on the upper floors of a once-grand Centro Habana mansion: the building where Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío filmed Fresa y Chocolate, the 1993 film that became the first Cuban nomination for an Academy Award. It is a paladar — one of the private, family-run restaurants legalised in Cuba's 1993 reforms — and one of the longest-running in the city.
The approach is as much the point as the food. You climb a marble staircase through a building that has been left to weather around it, columns and plasterwork and all, before reaching the dining rooms and a rooftop bar at the top.
It is the best-known paladar in Havana and fills accordingly, so book dinner ahead — and confirm on the day, because hours here move with the power supply.
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