Enrique Nunez

The Path

Systems thinking came before restaurant work. Early in his career, Enrique Nunez worked as a telecommunications engineer, a field built on structure, clarity, and the need for systems to hold under pressure. In restaurant terms, that background reads as operational discipline: attention to sequence, calm under load, and a practical sense of how parts depend on one another. Hospitality entered by a nontraditional route. Núñez did not arrive at La Guarida through formal culinary schooling or a classic restaurant brigade. The useful inheritance was discipline, problem-solving, and the ability to make separate functions work together inside an unusual site. In an apartment that had to become a restaurant while retaining its own identity, those skills mattered. Management at La Guarida is a stewardship of conditions as much as a job title. As manager, Núñez holds together rooms, staff, guests, and an existing narrative attached to the address. The craft is not only administration; it is the daily control of an experience that begins before the guest reaches the table.

The Work Today

La Guarida in Havana operates from the apartment-turned-destination that Enrique Núñez and Odeysis Baullosa created after travelers began visiting the film location. The practical move was important: the address did not remain a fixed point for looking and leaving. It became a working restaurant where visitors could sit, eat, and take part in the current life of the place. The restaurant’s identity depends on layered use. What began in Central Havana as a response to visitors looking for a film location became La Guarida. The apartment was not erased in favor of a conventional restaurant shell; the restaurant emerged from the apartment’s atmosphere, allowing domestic space, performance history, and dining to occupy the same frame. Place remains part of the operating method. La Guarida is shaped by Havana and by the textures of Central Havana, not simply located there. Núñez’s work is to keep that sense of arrival controlled rather than overplayed, so the room, the service, and the food remain connected to the address that made the restaurant possible.

In Their Words “When we opened La Guarida, we really had limited experience or ideas about restaurants and food. I am an engineer by profession and my wife is an actress.” The statement is useful because it names the working materials plainly: engineering and acting, structure and performance, method and presence. La Guarida’s first language came from that combination rather than from inherited restaurant grammar.

Acclaim

Recognition for La Guarida rests on use, not preservation alone. The space was not kept only as a film site; it was made into a living restaurant in Havana, with New Cuban cuisine as its working vocabulary and the evolution of traditional Cuban food as its guiding craft. The achievement is the continuing translation from apartment to restaurant, from film memory to hospitality, and from traditional Cuban food to an evolving expression of New Cuban cuisine.