On a beautiful winter afternoon last year, my parents came to visit me in Miami Beach, and we decided to walk to lunch at the Café at Books & Books, on Lincoln Road. I live just six blocks away, a 15-minute stroll beneath a cool canopy of trees. Two minutes into the walk, though, my mother tripped and fell on the sidewalk. We didn’t know it then, but she had cracked her kneecap. She was (she later confessed) in awful pain, but my father and I insisted she “walk it out.” Dad and I, two former jocks, found it hard to take Mom’s complaints very seriously. Besides, even Mom was looking forward to a good meal and a couple of glasses of wine, and she, too, was reluctant to turn back.
By the time we got to the restaurant, my mother was pale. Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of the bookstore, happened to be there with his wife, Rachelle. He took one look at Mom and ordered the waitstaff to bring her some ice, which was delivered by none other than chef Bernie Matz. After telling Mom how to put her foot up, he began a conversation with us about the best way to fry tostones. Several weeks later, I saw Matz again. And the first thing he did was ask how my mom was doing.
That is what I call a true Cuban chef.
Miami is full of Cuban restaurants: humble fondas, chain restaurants, nostalgia factories, temples to nouvelle. There are restaurants named after gathering spots in prerevolutionary Havana. Restaurants started by pop stars. Restaurants in the airport, in strip malls, by the highway—complete with plastic plates and drive-ins. Miami may be the only city in America where a heaping plate of black beans and rice is easier to find than a hamburger. Connoisseurs abound. And you don’t need to be Cuban to have an informed debate about who makes the best Mojito, where to get the best flan, which places offer the best black beans.
In the end, though, it isn’t really about the food. It’s about who’s feeding you. Who’s eating with you. And why. Eating is purely about sustenance. Dining, which is far more complicated, is all about belonging.
In the fine tradition of émigré restaurants throughout the centuries, Miami’s Cuban food scene is sustained by liberal helpings of scheming and nostalgia. Overindulgence is not just inevitable; it’s required. And every restaurant’s public reputation rides on its unique, individual resonance.
So Versailles Restaurant, on Calle Ocho, garishly overexposed nowadays, will for me always be the place we went to for an escape from the all-night funerals we attended just across the street, at what was then called Rivero Funeral Home.
Cuban wakes tend to be 24-hour affairs, tragicomic opportunities to mourn while catching up with the cousins you haven’t seen in five years. My parents had no qualms about taking me to these things when I was a child. We would sit around, wide-eyed and prematurely contemplating our mortality, while the men smoked cigars and told stories. Late at night, someone would say, “Quieren café?” and an advance party of the bleary would go down to Versailles and bring back a few Coladas in Styrofoam cups. Later, in the early morning, we would all go down there for a meal.
Memory, family, and a Creole palace with Sun King pretensions on Calle Ocho: Fear of death, under the circumstances, was a sure sign of a weak imagination.
Today, Versailles is the quintessential Cuban cliché, a requisite stop for any serious political campaign and the first place out-of-town reporters go for a quote. The only time I shook hands with Bill Clinton was at Versailles, during his first presidential run, when he was just the gringo from Arkansas. He was taller and thinner than I expected. And surprisingly handsome. I hesitated only briefly before taking his hand.
Politics has always been the most popular dish at Versailles. And the most artfully prepared. Last year, a group of exiles decided, as a publicity stunt, to bury an effigy of Fidel Castro in a bloody coffin. The venue? The Versailles parking lot, of course. I stopped by to cover it and ran into my cousins, who were there to pick up some chorizo to take home to Orlando. We didn’t say it, but I suspect we were all thinking the same thing: Better than meeting at Rivero’s.
After 35 years, Versailles is still the place to be seen, its mirrored walls reflecting a community that every year falls more deeply in love with the idea of contemplating itself. And the food? Who cares?
Truth is, Cuban food is nothing special. It has few moving parts. The basic meal consists of white rice; black beans; plantains; and some meat, usually roast chicken, ground-beef hash, or pork in a variety of styles whose guiding principles involve garlic and overcooking. The cuisine’s simplicity belies an ancestral richness that takes in the native (yuca), the Spanish (white-bean stews and chorizo), and the African (okra and root vegetables). In the end, though, it’s basic peasant stuff, as hard to get wrong as it is to make transcendent. Cuban food is what it is. And, as such, it’s the last of the world’s great comforts.
It may be true that Lila’s made the best flan. Or that the palomilla steak at Rancho Luna—according to my Italian-Colombian brother-in-law—is the hands-down best in Miami. I think the roast chicken at Puerto Sagua, in Miami Beach, has few rivals. And an old love swore by the papas rellenas at El Cacique, in downtown Miami. He dragged me there more than once. The stuffed potatoes were okay. Better still was sitting across from him.
It turns out that eating, like most transporting pleasures, is really about communion. And if Cuban food lacks the spice and variety of other cuisines, in Miami its bland stolidity has become the perfect foil to the crazy circus of exile.
Nena’s—despite its lack of ambiance—has long been the place for the power brokers. Enriqueta’s—where I shared a wonderful paella with Cuban sculptor Tony Lopez—is a favorite with downtown artists. A group from the business association known as the Kendall Networkers meets at one of the many branches of the popular La Carreta restaurants. Puerto Sagua, in addition to its excellent roast chicken, displays the whimsical creations of the famed Scull sisters.
I took The Miami Herald’s new executive editor there earlier this year. Everything was going well until I tried to order tostones with my bacalao. The waitress scolded me immediately: The dish already came with maduros and I would get too full with plantains before I could enjoy the fish.
The number and variety of Cuban restaurants in Miami is proof that other countries’ troubles are the stuff of American gastronomic dreams. When people are forced to leave their homes because of hunger or strife, the first thing they do in the new world is open a restaurant and start cooking. The impulse is born not just of simple economic need but also of the desire to transform raw ingredients into something nourishing and familiar. It’s a bold and optimistic act: to believe that the memory of deprivation and disappointment can be salved with perfect arroz con pollo.
In the early years of the Cuban diaspora, Miami Cuban food hewed fairly close to tradition. Everyone was in a holding pattern then—better not to stray from the details lest you forget them. The years stretched into decades and not much changed. Then, little by little, younger chefs began experimenting with history. Douglas Rodriguez recklessly crusted fish with crushed plantains and dared to suggest that Cuban food could be the stuff of fine dining. And time gave people like Bernie Matz, of Cuban-Jewish descent, permission to bring their private cultural histories into the dining room.
The dishes Matz creates for the Café at Books & Books can only be described as Traditional Miami: Black-bean hummus with bagel chips, grilled skirt steak in Bernie’s sprightlier mojo, and a seafood salad that, instead of asking you to forget about home, begs you to consider the delights of your new one.
As the culinary revolution went, so did the political one. By the time Neli Santamarina opened Tinta y Café, near downtown Miami, the next generation was primed for new ideas. Santamarina serves them alongside updated standbys like La Noche Entera, a crisper, heartier American version of the classic Cuban medianoche sandwich. Her other traditional sandwiches have also undergone semantic revolutions: Mom’s pork sandwich became El Guajiro; the Elena Ruz was rechristened La Francesita.
Once a month, Santamarina opens up the café to a “tertulia,” a gabfest where Cubans of all political persuasions are invited to hash it out. It can be a thankless proposition in Miami. But Santamarina can’t help herself: “Politics is part of the digestion process,” she said.
It’s tempting to describe Tinta y Café as the anti-Versailles. But that’s unfair to both restaurants, which have very different philosophies. Where Versailles is brash and huge, Tinta y Café is small and subdued, a Left Bank understatement to Versailles’s Champs-Élysées excess. But the young Tinta has already garnered the kind of attention Versailles worked for years to cultivate: The local newsweekly pronounced its croquetas “The Best of Miami.” And when PBS needed to interview “moderate” anti-Castroites when the ailing Cuban leader delegated day-to-day political oversight to his brother, Raúl, last year, crews stopped by the little café on Calle Ocho.
Now, 48 years into our endless discontent, the city of Miami has Cuban restaurants for every taste and persuasion. But ask a young Cuban where she goes for the best food, and she’ll say “to Mom’s,” like any good immigrant’s child. My mother’s picadillo is still the standard by which I judge all others. When I complain that a recipe is too bland or missing something, it’s because it’s everything the one I grew up eating wasn’t.
I was raised in a home where the women cooked every day, if not with constant pleasure at least with joy. There was little experimenting. And, except for the occasional spaghetti with meatballs, there was rarely a deviation from the Cuban script. Boliche, picadillo, arroz con pollo. Experimentation was left to me and my sister, Rose: Today, we’ll make picadillo and add pine nuts—for crunch—and chopped beets, instead of potatoes, for sweetness. Our tongue-in-cheek tamal “en cazuela” (tamale pie) is the hit of our parties with the cousins.
The only thing no one ever dared to mess with was the pig. Every year, the family gathered in the backyard to roast a whole pig in a pit. Between the smell and the smoke, it makes for my own 35-pound madeleine.
The pig would be set out to marinate the night before. The men would split it and pour the sour orange and garlic into the rib cavities. The next day, the roasting would be an all-day affair, the way it had been in Cuba.
Memory, not surprisingly, was the key ingredient. My father left Varadero for the States at the age of 20. He had yet to meet my mother. And his siblings and parents were stuck in Cuba. After a brief stay in Miami, he moved out to California. Those first years were bereft of both comfort and familiarity. A sad, not uncommon situation, and one that called for a good old-fashioned pig roast.
My father’s first efforts in suburban Los Angeles attracted the attention of suspicious neighbors. But Dad was undaunted, and for the next 30 years a pig roasting in the ground was more emblematic of Christmas than the artificial tree blinking in the living room.
I can only imagine all that the pig roast meant to my parents’ generation. Even as a girl, I could grasp its ritual importance: the digging, the setting of the coals, the stones, the grill, the banana leaves. The long, slow cooking. The men gathered around it, poking and prodding as they drank Budweisers and told jokes we weren’t allowed to hear. So it went for decades, the same story repeated across Miami’s backyards, and no one daring to say that now and then, frankly, the meat left a little something to be desired.
Then came the Revolution of the Chinese Box. La Caja China sneaked up on me. I left Miami for a few years, and when I returned everyone seemed to have one.
The Caja China is the creation of Roberto Guerra and his father, who made their first prototype in the ’80s. As Guerra tells it, his father based the design on a vague recollection of a device that Chinese immigrants in Cuba used for roasting: a box where the fire was positioned above the meat, not under it. “Roasting a pig the old way is a pain,” Roberto told me.
It’s true. But sales were modest at first. Cubans in Miami were slow to take to the contraption and clung to the old way, no matter how unpredictable it was. But the first intrepid buyers told a few friends and they told a few friends. Word of mouth spread.
It’s true that the Caja China looked like a pine coffin on wheels. It threatened tradition. But it produced the previously impossible: an almost perfect roasted pig. As Roberto put it, “You can’t mess it up.”
In 2004, The New York Times wrote a feature on La Caja China and sales exploded. Famous chefs came calling. So did the James Beard Foundation. Today, La Caja China does 82 percent of its business outside the state of Florida. It has yearly revenues of some $2.4 million and sells boxes everywhere from Hawaii to Spain. Earlier this year, Guerra moved to a new warehouse in the Medley section of Miami, doubling his square footage to 20,000. Christmas is a busy season. But so is the Fourth of July. The Caja China, it turns out, has been a monster hit with los americanos.
“At first we thought it would be a Hispanic thing,” Guerra said. “But Americans love their barbecue. They spend six months under the snow, and as soon as it’s over, they’re outside barbecuing.”
And what’s best is that they follow directions.
“The Cubans here, they’re lifting the lid, taking a look at it, talking about it,” Guerra said. “The Americans, they leave it alone. If you tell them they need to go out in their pajamas, they’ll do it.”
A few years ago, my die-hard traditionalist father finally gave in and bought his own Caja China. He was getting older; it was hard work, digging that hole every year. And there wasn’t a new generation to help out: His sons-in-law were uninterested and unversed in the whole digging-roasting-drinking ritual.
So Dad picked up the box and set it up. It was so easy. He split the pig, laid it out, put the mesh over it and covered it with coals. Then he closed the lid, rolled it out to the driveway, and left it there. A few hours later, he rolled it back in and uncovered the box, and we ate.
The pig was perfect. Crisp skin covering the moist, expertly cooked flesh. Not a trace of the temperamental roasts of years past. Everyone praised the cook and had seconds. Dad, though, seemed uncomfortable. An era was passing. He was no longer king of the backyard pig roast. What of all those years of struggle and sweat? The hard labor that went into digging the pit? Would we one day forget how difficult it had been?
Nah. It had never really been about the pig anyway.
Address Book
Cacique Lunch Restaurant 112 W. Flagler St., Downtown (305-372-3323). Café at Books & Books 933 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach (305-532-3222). La Carreta 11740 Kendall Dr., Kendall (708-596-5973). Enriqueta’s Sandwich Shop 186 N.E. 29th St., Wynwood (305-573-4681). Nena Restaurant 3791 Bird Rd., Miami (305-446-4881). Puerto Sagua 700 Collins Ave., Miami Beach (305-673-1115). Rancho Luna Restaurante 45 N.W. 22nd Ave., Miami (305-642-9123). Tinta y Café 268 S.W. 8th St., Miami (305-285-0101). Versailles Restaurant 3555 S.W. 8th St. (Calle Ocho), Little Havana (305-444-0240).