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Cuba’s Scariest Food!!

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Sonny Side goes wrist-deep into a Cuban swamp to hunt down the island’s least-talked-about protein.

Cuba’s food scene usually gets reduced to lechón and rum, but the Best Ever Food Review Show host Will Sonbuchner — known to his audience as Sonny Side — went looking for something rarer in his February 23, 2020 upload, “Cuba’s Secret Meat Obsession!! Dangerous Crocodile Catch and Cook!!!” The episode tracks Sonny and a local guide named Oro as they wade into crocodile territory near Cuba’s wetlands, wrestle a live animal out of the water, and turn it into dinner over an open fire. It’s a catch-and-cook in the truest sense, with none of the sanitized supermarket-meat middle step.

• Sonny partners with local guide Oro and experienced handlers to physically capture a live crocodile from the water before bringing it to shore.
• The team skins and butchers the animal on-site, harvesting the tail and body meat as the prime cuts.
• The crocodile meat is braised and fried outdoors over a wood flame with traditional Cuban aromatics, then taste-tested on camera, with Sonny describing it as lean and closer to firm poultry or pork than anything reptilian.

The Hunt Comes Before the Cook

Most of BEFRS’s episodes start in a market or a kitchen. This one starts in the water. Sonny and his Cuban hosts head into crocodile habitat tied to the island’s wetland systems, most notably the Zapata Swamp region, where hunting and eating crocodile has quietly persisted as a rural tradition even as the rest of Cuban cuisine leans on pork, chicken, and rice and beans. Wrangling a live crocodile by hand is exactly as dangerous as it sounds, and the footage leans into that tension rather than cutting away from it — the show has built its whole identity on Sonny actually doing the dangerous, unglamorous part of “catch and cook” rather than narrating it from a safe distance.

It’s the same instinct that’s sent other travel-and-survival creators after animals most viewers would rather avoid, in the spirit of segments like bare-handed shark fishing or island-based foraging runs like catch and cook from isolation on an uninhabited island. The appeal isn’t shock value alone — it’s watching someone with real local knowledge, in this case Oro, do something that looks reckless but is actually a practiced skill passed down in the community.

From Riverbank to Butcher’s Block

Once the crocodile is secured, the episode shifts into the butchery most viewers have never seen up close. The carcass is skinned and broken down to isolate the tail meat and body meat prized for cooking, cuts that Cuban hunters in these communities have processed this way for generations. There’s no refrigerated case, no plastic wrap — just a knife, a fire pit, and a crew working fast in the heat.

The seasoning and cooking method are pure rustic Cuban technique: the meat is braised and fried in outdoor pots over open wood flame, worked in alongside the same staple aromatics that flavor lechón and other island dishes. It’s a reminder that Cuban cooking, at its most traditional, doesn’t distinguish much between “exotic” and “everyday” — it’s about working with whatever protein is actually available in a given region, the Caribbean-survival logic captured in pieces like survival on the smallest island in the Caribbean.

The Verdict on the Meat

After the crocodile is cooked, Sonny and his guides sit down for the taste test that anchors every BEFRS episode. The consensus: crocodile is lean, dense, and firmer than most poultry — closer in bite to a tougher cut of pork than to fish or chicken breast, and nothing like the “swampy” flavor a lot of viewers assume they’re in for.

Lean, firm, and closer to pork than anyone watching probably expected — that’s the crocodile verdict straight from the fire.

That reaction is the whole point of the episode. Sonny’s crew didn’t just film a novelty hunt — they framed crocodile as a legitimate, if unconventional, protein source that’s been part of rural Cuban diets for years, not a stunt dreamed up for YouTube.

BEFRS built its channel on exactly this kind of ground-level access, the same approach that’s taken Sonny into everything from remote island communities to markets most tourists never see. Cuba’s crocodile hunters won’t be showing up in a travel brochure anytime soon, but for anyone tracking where Sonny heads next on the channel, betting on another wild-caught protein far from a supermarket shelf is a safe one.