Madera

Summary

We continue to explore the neighborhood in Long Island City. This street is littered with all sorts of restaurants, and the recent one that got our interest was this Cuban themed restaurant. We were able to walk in without any reservations on a Friday night around 8 PM.

With our meal, we were served bread with a chimichurri variant. The bread was lukewarm and not toasted much at all, but the inside was soft.

For cocktails, the red is a regular sangria, and the orange is a sparkling sangria. Both were good, but nothing to write home about.

The Cuban style grilled shrimp (camarones a la parilla estilo cubano) came with 4 marinated shrimp served on top of some type of citrus with a chimichurri-esque sauce over it. The shrimp was tender with that classic grill taste. I wish I had some bread to dip into the citrus sauce.

The lechon asado con mojo criollo was basically slow roasted pork that melts in your mouth. For those that don’t like the strong pork smell, this might not be for you. But this definitely tastes similar to regular BBQ pulled pork but with more water and juices in it. It was quite delicious. The pulled pork was served in what looked like a fried yucca sheet basket. On the bottom was some mashed sweet plantains, and on the side it was served with a small salad. The plantains I thought were a little too sweet for me to complement this. I was looking for something salty. The salad itself was mediocre as this definitely was salty for some reason. I was expecting some sort of vinagrette on this. In the end though, the pork really was the standout component.

The steak with sauteed onions (bistec de palomilla encebollado) was kind of a miss for me, but the lady loved it. I generally prefer my meat red and bleeding a bit, whereas this one was cooked pretty thorough. The meat ended up being a little on the chewy side, but I suppose that’s how it was meant to be. The rice and beans actually were pretty decent.

For dessert, we got guava bread pudding with vanilla. The guava bread pudding came in piping hot and was pretty good. There were little pieces of red guava meat in it, but it was in no way super strong or overly sweet. The vanilla ice cream arguably wasn’t entirely needed, but it does taste wonderful with the bread pudding.

All in all, the service here was pretty prompt. The ambiance was fairly quiet too on this particular Friday cold night. I think a lot of the dishes reminded me of Argentina and Brazilian for some reason. I admit though that I am not really versed in Cuban food.

Final Verdict

I think this restaurant is pretty good for what it is especially if you’re craving some Latin America style grilled meats.

Yelp Jabs

We were a party of 4…with my husband still parking the car we came in from the cold and requested a table, only to be told we would need to wait for everyone in our party to be there otherwise “please wait in the corner” says the hostess. Excuse me? Wait in the corner!? The place is tiny and no place to go, rather than seat us you ask us to wait in the corner so as not to block the door!? Strike one

Yes folks. In New York City, you need to have your entire party present before you can be seated. I suppose if this Yelpist didn’t want to sit in the corner, they could have probably just left and go to another restaurant. But they chose to stay, so we can see who bent over.

Never again…overpriced, food took forever to arrive and it wasn’t even good. 5 of us all hated our meals. I hate to write a negative review but chef needs to step up his game. This isn’t a restaurant pp should go to for brunch….

Ah the funny Yelpist brunch crowd. Good thing I don’t care for brunch.

Now I’m not a picky eater, but I’d rather eat cardboard for dinner. I don’t know what that eatable bowl was, chips? No clue. But it held veggies with beef mixed together. It was terrible. We switched plates. The steak was, by far, more satisfying!

Well you can’t really fault a restaurant for trying at least. This Yelp Elitist might be out of their comfort zone for trying new things.