Eating well in Cuba is not always easy. Restaurants can be expensive and touristy, street food gnarly and disappointing. But then there are the paladars, restaurants run out of Cubans’ own houses and apartments, offering excellent and often creative home cooking. It was into one of these paladars, in Havana, that the members of the Los Angeles band Ozomatli stepped one night in 1997.
“That meal was incredible,” recalls percussionist Justin Poree. Nothing fancy, he says, just great rice and beans and perfect avocados, like the home cooking he’d had at Cuban parties in L.A.—“tasty, really fatty, but so good, man.” It was when this group of normal-looking twentysomethings—dressed in jeans, colorful sneakers, and general post-skater garb—revealed to their hosts that they were musicians, however, that things got fun. “I just remember, like, somebody’s grandmother or aunt coming out, and she had claves”—the percussion instrument made of two short, resonant wooden sticks. “And she just started playing and singing, and we were hitting on the tables and stuff, so it just became like a big jam session. But in Cuba that shit happens all the time—everywhere.”
Perhaps so, but it probably happens more often when you’re a member of Ozomatli, the Grammy-winning Los Angeles band whose music encompasses hip-hop and merengue, jazz and dancehall, indie rock and Indian raga—sometimes within a single song. Since Ozomatli came together in 1995, its members have toured roughly 40 countries, from Argentina to Madagascar to Mongolia to Japan to Jordan, connecting with foreign cultures not just through music but through food, an interest virtually all the band members share.
Or maybe it’s more obsession than interest. As Wil-Dog Abers, the bassist, puts it, “Our whole life revolves around music and food.” For all of them, the dual obsessions began early in life, although for each in different ways. Lead singer Asdru Sierra, guitarist Raul Pacheco, and saxophonist Ulises Bella grew up in Latino households in L.A., where their mothers (and grandmothers and aunts) cooked mostly traditional Mexican food—moles, taquitos, rice and beans—which is not to say that’s all they ate. Bella’s father was Spanish, and in summertime the family would visit Barcelona and the province of Navarra. There, Bella would hunt for snails to make sopa de caracol, and feast on cured meats: chorizo, butifarra (a garlicky pork sausage), jamón Ibérico.
Abers had a typically atypical L.A.-melting-pot food education. His family was poor, surviving on food stamps and cheese and butter from government programs, but his Jewish grandparents regularly took him out for classic deli meals—pickled herring, bagels, lox. And Abers lived in the inner city alongside Mexican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, and Guatemalan communities, attending a magnet school whose students represented every culture in greater L.A. “My mom always says I was the kid that would just go to my friends’ house and would go straight to the fridge to see what they had,” he says.
Throughout their childhoods, all were getting into music, too. Poree’s dad was a Motown studio musician, Sierra’s would listen to antique mambo records, and percussionist Jiro Yamaguchi, who grew up in Tokyo and upstate New York, was going to Wayne Shorter concerts with his parents. So, by the time Ozomatli coalesced, its members had absorbed a host of musical and culinary influences, although when it came to food, they were each at different levels of adventurousness. While snail-eating Bella was ready to order truffle gnocchi at Il Pastaio in Beverly Hills (on their booking agent’s dime), Sierra was more cautious. “I mean, I thought my grandmother’s cooking was the best in the world,” Sierra said. “I never really thought on the idea of eating another food. The only way I did was because I was traveling or hanging out with different people. Then that opened my whole consciousness to a whole plethora of food.”
First up was sushi, which he tasted during an “expensive dinner” with Ozomatli’s record label. That’s weird, but I’ll try it, is what Sierra thought at the time. “And I remember loving it. And then I went to Japan, and I was like, Oh, this is different. It was amazing.” Part of his enthusiasm, he says, came from learning the history of sushi—how vinegared rice and seaweed were originally used to preserve fish—though he was also inspired by the pure excitement of eating Japanese food in Japan.
Which is not to say that Ozomatli managed to leapfrog over the tragic eating-on-tour experiences of most hardworking bands. The band members speak with horror of truck stops, of Denny’s, of a poorly catered tour, of an unprintably disgusting midshow food-poisoning incident involving a band they were touring with.…
But as Ozomatli’s tours took the group ever farther afield—a travel schedule that broadened dramatically in 2007, when the band became official Cultural Ambassadors for the U.S. State Department—they took the opportunity to sample increasingly exotic cuisines, to the point where formerly sushi-shy Sierra was trying pig heart in cow’s-blood broth in China. (“It tasted great,” he claims, adding that he was the only one with the nerve to order it.)
In interviews with the band members, Vietnam came up again and again as a favorite destination, and not just because they’d managed to sell out an 8,000-seat arena in Ho Chi Minh City in 2009. (“They were free tickets and kids were scalping the tickets!” says Poree.) The band unanimously loved the food—in particular at Nhà Hàng Ngon, a Ho Chi Minh City restaurant where street-food artisans from all over Vietnam cook their specialties under one roof. “They have these huge snails,” Poree recalls. “And they have these big things—they were like pancakes—and you’d stuff different types of, like, grasses in there, and herbs and the snail meat. I forget what they call it, man, but that shit—it was good, dude.” [ Our research suggests the ecstasy Poree describes was either banh xeo or banh hoi—Ed.]
To figure out where to eat on tour, Ozomatli relies on a variety of sources: its State Department handlers, online recommendations from blogs and Yelp!, and fellow musicians (one in Miami introduced Abers to the arepa burger, consisting of a burger, ham, Colombian chorizo, and a fried egg sandwiched between two arepas, or corn cakes—“like a Cuban sandwich on crack,” says Abers). Even fans attending their concerts can be helpful, like the one whose family ran the spiciest curry restaurant in Osaka, Japan.
“We always try to find local spots that have some kind of history, cachet, whatever,” Pacheco maintains. “And it can be anything—common, everyday food, it can be a high-end restaurant. People know that we enjoy that experience because part of it is connecting to the iconic aspects of a particular area.” Ironically, the band members have discovered that making those connections to places and people is often easier through food—their avocation—than through their actual profession.
Music, says Pacheco, “is just not as intimate in that sense. It’s a big woo-hoo. That’s what you want in that scene: a lot of people moving together, singing together. It’s an affirmation. It’s a relief. But when you’re sitting at a table or sitting at a stand or sitting in a restaurant, you get to have a little moment that’s just eye-to-eye. You don’t have all the lights-camera-action vibe.”
In recent years, Ozomatli has also been getting “eye-to-eye” with serious chefs here in America. Spanish culinary wizard José Andrés, whose restaurants in L.A. and Washington, D.C., won him last year’s James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef, is a huge fan, and once showed up backstage bearing an entire leg of jamón Ibérico. And last summer, chef Susan Feniger, of Border Grill and Street in L.A., hosted a party for the band, who are her longtime customers. Feniger’s Taste of Ozo menu featured foods inspired by Ozomatli’s travels: Indian pani puri, miniature Vietnamese banh mi, Syrian lamb meatballs, Burmese melon salad—street foods, essentially, Feniger and Ozomatli’s shared love. “You know, every time I travel, I eat on the street,” Feniger said. “And every time they travel, they eat on the street. ”
As Ozomatli has traveled, its members have gotten not only more adventurous in their eating but also healthier—only natural since they’re all in their late 30s and early 40s. Jiro carries raw almonds to munch on, Abers brings instant oatmeal, and they all avoid fast food as much as possible (although it’s hard to resist the siren song of an arepa burger). Sierra even sheepishly admits to enjoying a variation on chorizo with eggs—possibly the band’s favorite single dish—invented by his wife. “She makes me chorizo one morning, and I’m loving it, man, it’s just amazing stuff,” he recalls. “And for some reason it is not as greasy. I was like, ‘Wow, baby, this is awesome.’ And she goes, ‘I made it with egg whites.’ I go, ‘How is that going to help? It’s chorizo.’ So I’m laughing, and she goes, ‘That’s because it’s soy-rizo.’ I said, ‘What?’ It changed my life.”
And there you have Ozomatli’s culinary journey, from L.A. chorizo to Chinese pig heart and back again—though never quite the same.
Matt Gross writes frequently for the New York Times travel section, is a contributing writer at Afar magazine, appears regularly in Saveur, and blogs about parenting at DadWagon.com. His last piece for Gourmet Live was Eating by Taxi in Ho Chi Minh City. Follow him on Twitter @worldmattworld.