with which Cuban families celebrate their daughters' fifteenth birthdays.
On weekends, Cuban families flocked to Key Biscayne with makeshift kitchens in tow. They filled the peaceful, tree-lined beach at Cape Florida with Latin radio music and fast-paced Spanish dialog. While the children swam, parents and grandparents cooked meals under the pine trees, and the tempting aroma of Cuban barbecue and rice and beans warmed the ancient stones of the lighthouse.
At the time, two kinds of restaurants catered to the burgeoning Cuban population: large, ornate Spanish establishments that appealed to their strong Spanish roots and the Mediterranean elements of their cuisine, and small cafeterias. The cafeterias were oases where people went late at night to eat Cuban sandwiches with cafe con leche (coffee with lots of milk) or during the day to meet and talk over sips of strong coffee from tiny paper cups.
Miami Cubans are like the coffee they drink: bittersweet, intense, and passionate, embracing their new home with the same ferocity with which they cherish their native Cuba. It is this paradoxical longing for what was lost and attachment to what is new that has transformed Miami into a hybrid Cuban city where even the old men playing dominoes on Eighth Street (Calle Ocho), nostalgic for Cuba, are among the most devoted of Miamians.
Each new wave of immigrants has refreshed the "Cubanness" lost by the previous, more assimilated groups. A virtual tidal wave of immigrants washed over South Florida in 1980, when Castro released 125,000 Cubans. In the years that followed, open-air markets that resembled chunks of Cuba—with pigs roasting close to the sidewalk, outdoor fruit stands, and people sitting down on wooden stools to drink coconut juice—sprouted in Miami. Once the most popular of these markets, El Palacio de los Jugos, is now a must-see for any food writer and tourist visiting the area.
There are several interesting cafes in and around Espanola Way serving a variety of Cuban staples.
Though Cuban coffee may look like espresso, don't he fooled by appearances. It is even thicker and stronger.
Drawn by the success of the Cubans, many other Latin Americans began settling in the region. Miami became the emotional and economic capital of the Latin American world, attracting many of its movie and television stars and pop singers. Today, 1.1 million, or nearly 60 percent, of metropolitan Miami's 2 million residents are Latin-American, about half of them Cuban. The Cuban population continues to grow as Cubans living elsewhere in the United States fulfill what seems to be their destiny: to end their days in Miami.
For Cubans and other Latin Americans, the road to Miami was built of shattered dreams and the mortar of new hope. At the road's end sits a great pot in which the flavors of all of Latin America simmer and beckon. You can sample Salvadoran pupusas (stuffed tortillas), Argentinian churrasco (grilled meat), and Nicaraguan tres leches ("three milks" cake). The town of Sweetwater has become the heart of the Nicaraguan community, where you can enjoy desserts in informal cafeterias and small bakeries and flavorful meats at elegant steak houses. Adding to the traditional bastions of Cuban fare, such as Versailles and La Carreta on Eighth Street, are newer, upscale restaurants, including Yuca and Victor's Cafe, offering an inventive, hybrid cuisine.
Part of the ongoing cultural replenishment of Miami is the merging of food and music. People go to restaurants where they can also enjoy shows by performers newly arrived from Cuba. This is the kind of lively night life for which Havana was once famous.
Every year before Lent, Miami explodes into the "Calle Ocho Festival," a huge carnival sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana to celebrate a community that has come of age. Its core is on Calle Ocho, where the first Cuban immigrants settled and where every block is crowded with kiosks, the smell of Cuban tamales, roast pork and black beans and rice mingling with that of Colombian arepas (corn patties) and Peruvian anticuchos (skewered beef heart). And then there is the music. Rhythmic and infectious, it captures the essence of those who move easily between two worlds and dance to one celebratory Miami beat.
Dining Out in Miami
Order a big dish of ropa vieja-and be sure to wear your best threads
by Kendall Hamersly
South Florida is a fusion of cultures, and South Florida dining is a fusion of cuisines—dishes from around the globe coming together in the same neighborhood, in the same restaurant, on the same plate. If you want to stamp a name on it, you can call it New Florida, New World, or Floribbean, but it is not so easily categorized.
The top of the dining pyramid is the domain of the Mango Gang, a loose group of innovators who invented New Florida cuisine, a casual fusion of the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Middle America. The big three are Allen Susser (of the elegant Chef Allen's in Aventura), rising national star Norman Van Aken (Norman's in Coral Gables) and Mark Militello (whose flagship Mark's Place has closed, but who now has the stunning and popular Mark's Las Olas in nearby Fort Lauderdale). These are the proving grounds and showcases for the best and most adventurous of the New Florida cuisine.
Yet the bottom of the pyramid, restaurants where you can dine for ten dollars or so, offers culinary adventures, as well. Little Havana, the neighborhood just west of downtown Miami, has the greatest concentration of Cuban restaurants in the United States, mostly rock-bottom budget places where you can gorge yourself on palomilla steak (sirloin marinated in garlic and lime juice, pounded thin and quickly fried), sweet fried plantains, and black beans and rice. A shining example (literally; just wait until you see the mirrors and chandeliers) is Versailles, where the tuxedoed wait staff applies the highest standards of service to the delivery of your six-dollar platter of ropa vieja (shredded beef in a savory tomato sauce).
Coral Gables' reputation for fine dining is the best in metropolitan Miami. In the heart of the Gables, a mix of charming Mediterranean architecture and futuristic office buildings, are dozens of superbly run restaurants with impeccable service and a dressy feel. In addition to Norman's, highlights include Giacosa, perhaps the area's best Italian restaurant, and The Heights, a spinoff of Pacific Time, Jonathan Eismann's bastion of Asian Rim cooking in South Beach. Where Pacific Time has a light, fish-oriented menu, The Heights takes a heartier, more Middle American approach.
Waiter from the Blue Door ready to serve.
A typical South Beach restaurant-very fun and noisy.
If it's down-home cooking you're looking for, one of the Gables' most popular eateries is the Biscayne Miracle Mile, a cafeteria specializing in Southern soul food. Put the Mile's 85-cent collard greens up against most $7.95 salads in a blind taste test, and you've saved yourself seven dollars and change. Nuevo Cuban cuisine has a major outpost in the Gables, though it's not a nuevo place: Victor's Cafe, founded in New York two decades ago and imported south, features dishes like red snapper in crunchy green plantain crust.
In nearby South Miami, Two Chefs Cooking's Jan Jorgensen and Soren Brendahl apply Mediterranean touches to hearty fare that one appreciative critic described as "nouvelle bistro." In Coconut Grove, The Grand Cafe at the Grand Bay Hotel dazzles visiting celebrities with its upscale menu.
The seafood hot spot of the moment in the Coral Gables-South Miami area is Red Fish Grill, a onetime beach house in Matheson Hammock Park on tree-lined Old Cutler Road. On a cool spring evening, you'll think you've died and gone to Hemingway as you dine outside on delicate, pan-seared sea bass. Farther down Old Cutler, at the private Deering Bay Yacht & Country Club, fish with tropical flourishes star on chef Paul Gjertson's menu. Along U.S. Route 1, you'll find the area's best family fish house, the Captain's Tavern, with an ideal mix of both simple fried fish and designer seafood. Also on U.S. Route 1, near the University of Miami, is the southern branch of downtown Miami's Fishbone Grille, where Chef David Bracha does a delectable Bahamian-style whole yellowtail with pigeon peas, rice and Scotch bonnet vinaigrette.
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