Havana Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge

The mojito is where Havana Restaurant & Cocktail Lounge starts the conversation, not where it ends one. The bar runs the classic alongside a long flavour list — mango, pineapple, passion fruit, habanero lime, coconut, cranberry, spicy mango — and treats the drink as a statement of intent rather than a token nod to Cuba. That posture carries through the rest of the cocktail card, from the Havana Colada to the Habla Matador's dark rum and spicy mango, and it sets the terms for everything the kitchen does in this downtown Niagara Falls dining room: Cuban food meant to be eaten with a glass in hand and a long evening ahead.

The food holds up its end. Ropa Vieja is the comfort centre of the menu — beef braised six hours and hand-shredded, folded with tomato, bell peppers, roasted garlic, onions, and cilantro, plated over congris with fried yuca. D's Paella is the order for the table, a Cuban-style pan of smoked sausage, roasted pork, grilled chicken, and shrimp over Spanish yellow rice that takes close to half an hour to come together. Havana Roasted Pork arrives as an eight-hour roasted leg under house mojo criollo. Around those anchors sit the smaller Cuban pleasures: croquetas and tostones rellenos with daily fillings, a cold Cuban shrimp cocktail, and tres leches cake soaked in sweet milk under Italian meringue to finish.

The drink list goes well past the cocktails. Sangria comes by the glass or the pitcher, the wine runs to Spanish bottles alongside local ones, there is Cuban coffee to close a meal, and a draft Latina beer for the table that wants something easier than rum. It is the range of a place that expects you to settle in for a while.

What the menu argues is that the bar and the kitchen are equal partners here, not a dining room with drinks attached. The dish names point one direction and the cocktail list points the same way, both built around a single idea of Cuban hospitality rather than split between a serious food program and an afterthought of a bar. The result reads less like a themed restaurant performing Cuba than like a kitchen and a bar that happen to share the same homeland and cook and pour accordingly.

That homeland belongs to the owners. Daelys Faife is a Cuban expat who learned to cook on the island, and the restaurant was his idea; he runs it with his wife, Marija Faife, whose name sits beside his on the door. Before Havana, according to local reporting, Daelys co-founded and later sold Mojito House Latin Bar and Restaurant, which explains why the cocktail program here carries real conviction. When they opened in 2023, the couple took over a Queen Street address that used to be Jeffro's BBQ and rebuilt it around vintage-car murals and colonial-building colour, the visual shorthand of old Havana. The mojito obsession is more than décor: in September 2024 the restaurant claimed a world record for the largest glass of mojito, a 4,500-litre pour that doubled as a fundraiser, sending a contribution to the Niagara Children's Centre.

All of which makes Havana more useful than a single dinner reservation suggests. Midweek it runs as a Cuban kitchen with a strong bar; on Friday and Saturday it stays open until two in the morning and shifts into Latin music and dancing, with a second-floor lounge for groups that want the night to keep going. The move is to order the paella early, start with a mojito while it cooks, and let dinner roll into whatever the weekend room becomes. The record-setting glass is long gone, but the idea behind it — that a mojito is worth making a spectacle of — is still the first thing the place wants a table to understand.