La Vitrola Restaurante — Restaurant in Cartagena

La vitrola, traditional upscale restaurant with more than 25 years of existence in Cartagena. Their experience its consistent with the quality of their dishes. One of the best restaurants I have tried in Cartagena, take into account the dress code and a the fact that it is expensive. Nice ambient with life music. Starters: Empanadas filled with mariscos combined with spicy suero (local sauce). Great!! loved them. Crunchy octopus, comes with smashed plantain both pretty nice. The octopus it’s really crunchy.

Cocktails: Mojito with hechicera rum, good taste and quantity of alcohol. Piña colada, big but too sweet. Only for sweet lovers.

Main dishes: Lobster raviolis, 👌🏻 right on point. They have the real lobster taste, full of lobster meat.

Coconut rissotto with lobster and shrimps, also a great choice a dish worth repeating. Maybe the best rissotto in Cartagena.

Dessert: Coconut pie, also good not as much as it is talked about. Its more like a coconut cake with ice cream. But still good, try it...

The service is great. So is the atmosphere, although the day we went it was tourists only it seemed. The live band was nice, but a little morose looking and lacking pep. The unfortunate part of this restaurant is its food and drinks. We had the shrimp ravioli and the shrimp rice dish. Both were largely flavorless and bland. The kitchen seems to want to use the same prawn-y bisque to try to flavor everything. The ravioli themselves were limp and seemed to contain only minced shrimp. It was difficult to tell as they were swimming in a pool of bisque. The kitchen opted to garnish this with a spoonful of chopped tomatoes, which was also disappointing. The shrimp rice was so tasteless and uninspired we didn't finish it. The food we did like better were the yucca empanadas, which were also on the tasteless side, but fun and crunchy with different textures. We had a cocktail here as well - weak, imbalanced and far too much...

It was OK. First, during booking and confirmation, we were told there was a dress code and no kids. Yet we were surrounded by tables of kids? Doesn’t bother us but odd. Additionally people had towels wrapped around them to hide their shorts? It’s just odd to have rules and not enforce them IDK. Could’ve overlooked it but we had the worst service. Took 25 minutes for someone to clear our appetizers once we finished eating. Food was fine. Not overly flavorful and the meat was a little tough but not bad. Took another 20 min to get a single pour of rum after our meal. Just weird because other tables were getting constant service? Additionally, the bathroom is outside and it was raining so I got fully rained on while using it. Maybe it was an off night. We did really enjoy the ravioli with...