It’s sad, really.
We’re in a small historic town on a Caribbean island. This is a good hotel, by most standards — big rooms, a lovely old building — but the restaurant clearly has delusions of grandeur.
At breakfast, it’s a buffet: nothing special, but perfectly adequate. But in the evening, it’s transformed into a “fine dining” restaurant. Silver service, a la carte menu, waiters in tuxedos.
And that’s where it all goes horribly wrong.
It’s obvious the hotel has put a lot of effort into an offering which no one wants, and the restaurant can’t possibly deliver: an exercise in futility, and a guarantee of failure.
It would have been clear to a blind man on a galloping horse that…
(a) Nobody really wants it.
For a start, the locals can’t afford it. (Some of the main courses are priced at roughly the country’s average weekly wage.) The better-off might aspire to come here once or twice, on special occasions.
The tourists, on the other hand, are on a tropical holiday in a place where the maximum level of formality they’d anticipate would be wearing a clean shirt to dinner. And probably shoes. At most they’d be hoping for a nice piece of grilled fish or steak, a salad, dessert and a rum cocktail or a beer.
So who’s the target market? Good question (and one the management should have asked much, much earlier). The answer is practically nobody, judging by the nearly empty restaurant on a Saturday night.
(b) They can’t possibly deliver.
The lengthy menu is designed with crazed creativity, plus a lot of optimism. It features such “fine dining” options as Lasagne in Orange Sauce, four kinds of pizza, Fish with Chinese (e.g. soy) Sauce and Vegetable Chop Suey, and Tapas (which includes fried egg and chips).
However, this is Cuba: some things aren’t obtainable at all, and the supply of everything else is unreliable. So at any given time many items on the menu won’t be available.
And there’s another complication. Because it’s in a hotel, this is an “official” restaurant, which means they’re required to source ingredients — mostly processed or frozen — from what’s 
available in the official government stores. But years ago, Cubans started opening tiny unregulated “restaurants”, called paladares, in their houses, with home cooking that featured whatever they could buy on the open market. The paladares were finally completely legalised in 2011, and not surprisingly, as any Cuban will tell you, their food is better and fresher. (Flipping through a Cuban cookbook one afternoon at a sidewalk bookstall in Havana, I ended up having an in-depth conversation with the bookseller about Cuban food. He waved an arm dismissively at the luxury hotel across the street and said, “Nobody needs a chef to cook Cuban food. It’s that simple.”)
All of this helps explain the quality of our food here at the hotel. There’s a “lobster salad”, which comprises four slices of half-raw frozen lobster tail, each the size of a postage stamp, plus a small handful of shredded lettuce, with no dressing. It is, incidentally, three times the cost of a whole fresh grilled lobster we’d eaten a few nights earlier at a paladar. And it’s marooned in the centre of a large plate decorated with piped swirls of something beige.
Later, the tournedos in red wine sauce arrives on a plate decoratively piped with swirls of something beige.
In both cases, ‘something beige’ turns out to be honey. Nothing wrong with it, as honey goes…except that no sane person would pair it with lobster or tournedos. Why is it there?
Maybe the chef had seen magazine photos of plates decorated with swirls of this and that, and thought they looked pretty jazzy.
But why honey? Well, there’s that question of availability. By coincidence, that very morning, just a block from the hotel, we’d walked past an open door leading to a small storeroom. Inside were dozens of huge drums, painted bright yellow…and clearly labelled “miel” (honey). Clearly, what was available that week was honey. Lots of it.
Meanwhile, back in the lonely dining room, the waiters’ manners are impeccable, their grooming immaculate. One can only hope they don’t realise just how embarrassing and unsuccessful their menu is (although I’m betting none of them would touch this food with a ten-foot pole).
And none of this is their fault. Someone, somewhere, decided that the best hotel in town needed a fine dining restaurant. Never mind what the market wants. Never mind the prevailing wisdom that a good restaurant should focus on what’s local, fresh…and available.
Sad, sad, sad.