Simmered Sobremesa
Ropa vieja is a Cuban classic but moreover, the dish has become a link between Cuban Americans and their culinary history across the Florida straits
Are you longing for a taste of travel? Few of us are doing much of that these days, either due to restrictions, health and safety concerns or both. Fortunately, there are ways to flavor our lives with distant places, whether the vacation is familiar or fantasy: through food. Welcome to a series where we’ll remind you that the tastes you miss — or those you long to try — are closer than you think.
Lisa Plasencia ate ropa vieja once a week while growing up. It was her little brother’s favorite meal, a pile of slow-simmered shredded beef, the white rice beneath absorbing the layered flavors of the salsa, the essence of the peppers, the onions, the garlic — the sofrito, the foundation of the dish.
“Ropa vieja is what your mom or your grandmother would make on Sunday when you’d all sit down and eat together. You almost don’t want to try someone else’s or order it at a restaurant,” she says, laughing. “Because you just want your mom’s.”
Plasencia is Cuban, as is her husband, Yojan Gonzalez, though he didn’t enjoy ropa vieja — a stew with Sephardic roots that came to Cuba with Spaniards from the Canary Islands, and oft touted as one of Cuba’s national dishes — with any kind of frequency until he was 22.
That’s because he was born in Havana.
“Beef was illegal when I was growing up,” says Gonzalez, “you had to get it on the black market — if you could get it at all.”
These days, he does more than enjoy ropa vieja — he sells it.
Plasencia and Gonzalez are the force behind A Lo Cubano Kitchen, an Orlando-area
food truck that serves a leveled-up taste of Miami — Plasencia’s hometown and where Gonzalez settled upon leaving Cuba in 2006.
Pre-Castro, numerous sources have reported there were more cattle than people, but dwindling numbers following the revolution prompted the government to criminalize their slaughter without permission. Even so, the herds never recovered.
It worsened, says Andrew Huse, in the “special period,” when the Soviet dissolution prompted a larger economic crisis.
“Things became even more restricted,” says Huse, a librarian in special collections for the University of South Florida and, through his various writings, something of a Cuban historian, particularly in the realm of food. “There was a higher penalty for killing a cow than if you murdered your neighbor.”
It was a time, he notes, when animals were disappearing from the zoo due to hunger amid the masses, “but the crisis wasn’t based on food as much as fuel. They couldn’t afford to ship the grain to the cows or move the cows to where the grain was. They were used to the gasoline subsidies from the Soviet Union and once that disappeared, the entire business of the nation ground to a halt.”
Though an island, “Cuba’s people have always favored meat — especially beef and pork,” says Huse, who opines that lechon (roast pork) with beans and rice and plantains would make a more sensible choice for a national dish. “Picadillo has long been a Cuban favorite. And tasajo (dried beef ) and palomilla steaks — along with ropa vieja.” All have largely disappeared.
“I didn’t eat ropa in Cuba,” says Ramon Martinez.
“I saw some picadillo, but really no beef.”
Martinez came to Miami in 1980 during the Mariel Boatlift. He was 20.
“And when I first tasted it, I fell in love,” he says. “It’s because of the salsa, the flavors — so rich. But there are not so many places, especially in Orlando, where you find it the right way.”
He enthusiastically recommends his wife’s version, which you can sample at the College Park Café.
Barbara Martinez purchased the place back in the summer of 2019, with full intent to keep its American diner classics while adding on the Cuban ones she’s been making since before she left her home in Guanabacoa, a township in eastern Havana.
“Now, I sell more Cuban food than American,” says a grateful Barbara, who offers dishes like ropa vieja, palomilla steak and a two-pound Cuban sandwich that’s been earning rave reviews from the city’s foodies, on the daily via her in-house offshoot — Abuelita’s Kitchen.
“I didn’t eat much ropa vieja until I came here,” she says. But unlike her husband, she’d had
it. “That’s because my mother and grandmother were chefs, too, and worked in a little restaurant — a mom-and-pop. It was a family business: Abuelita Cocina.”
Cooking goes back several generations in her family, but she began adding her own spins on her mother’s classics when she came to the States.
“I always loved to cook and oh — you come here, and you gain weight because you need to eat and taste everything!”
Back in Cuba, says Ramon, two generations before Castro, “my mother-in-law’s family would put garbanzo beans in the ropa vieja, which was more like what they did in Spain — the Isla Canaria version. Back then, Cubans had so many more ingredients — all the meat and the Spanish chorizo. When Castro took over, everything changed.”
Barbara’s ropa vieja — studded with the jewellike colors of peppers and green olives amid rich, burnished salsa made with red and white wine — is traditional. Flank steak is cut, boiled, pressure cooked, shredded and simmered, a threehour process. It is among the diner’s most popular
offerings.
“We have owners from other Cuban restaurants in Orlando who come here — two of them — to eat the ropa vieja,” says Ramon. “They are regulars with us.”
Plasencia and Gonzalez, spoiled by the options in South Florida, found the Cuban food scene lacking here as well, prompting the Four Seasons veterans to bring an elevated version to their food truck, one made with short rib — a cut more giving and forgiving.
“Ropa vieja can be hard to chew,” says Gonzalez, “even if it’s made with a lot of juice. The threads from the flank steak are really long. Not in the short rib, which also has much more fat in between — so there’s a lot more flavor.”
Heirloom tomatoes level it up, as well — the acid helping to balance the fat — before it gets piled onto a ciabatta, doused in their signature 305 aioli, topped with pickled onions and served in its simple paper boat.
If you’re smart, you’ll grab a fork. The sandwich, which goes for $12.50, is hefty — loads of meat, almost certainly a fingerlicker.
For all their love of ropa vieja, neither Plasencia nor Gonzalez nor the Martinezes — nor any of their Cuban friends or family — had any idea it was touted as a national dish.
In fact, the Martinezes returned to Cuba three years ago and went to one of Havana’s better known eateries — La Bodeguita del Medio — with friends, one of whom ordered the ropa vieja.
“It was pork!” says Ramon, who laughs that even the tourists aren’t guaranteed to get it the right way. “If Cuba had a national dish it would be white rice, some kind of bean and maybe chicharrón and eggs.”
In many ways, said each of them, ropa vieja has become more Cuban-American than anything else.
“[Cuban-Americans] have access to it, to how it’s really supposed to be made,” says Gonzalez, who sends money to his cousin in Cuba to help out. “It’s crazy. She has to wake up at 5 a.m. to get in line to buy chicken because that’s the easiest thing to buy…”
Sometimes the food runs out before everyone can shop, he says, and there are others who get up early to get in the line, then try to sell their spots to other people.
“Dishes like ropa vieja are the norm for us,” says Plasencia. “Not so much for them.”
Huse wonders what Cuba’s cuisine will look like going forward.
“The people who fled during Castro took some of the dishes with them, but not all. And a lot of the people who fled were of means,” he says, noting that many of those preserving the nation’s old-style country cooking never left.
“What’s really sad is that Cuba is kind of losing its collective memory of how to even make these dishes. The exile community can help with a ropa vieja dish — but what about a variation that comes from the outskirts of Santiago? Maybe not.”
Plasencia, whose parents came to the U.S. as children in the ‘60s during Operation Peter Pan, doesn’t feel any less Cuban for not having been there.
“We were raised in all the culture,” she says. “My parents and grandparents brought over those traditions… My brothers and I always wanted to go, but we didn’t want to disrespect our parents by going back when they struggled so much to get out.”
Ropa vieja is part of that culture, that sobremesa .
It means “over the table,” but it’s more a feeling, one that’s rooted in time spent with loved ones after a meal.
“It’s memories of being with your family, of having your grandparents with you,” says Plasencia, “Of Sunday dinners, cooking together, eating together, hanging out and sitting at the table forever.” She laughs.
That’s why when customers tell Gonzalez his food reminds them of their grandmother, it’s the greatest compliment they can pay.
“It means so much to have them respond that way,” he says, especially when the dish is not rooted in anything elevated.
“It still gives you all that love and comfort,” jokes Plasencia, of their luxe-level version. “It just doesn’t give your jaw as much of a workout.”
For the A Lo Cubano Kitchen food truck schedule, hit up their social accounts at facebook.com/ alocubanokitchen/ or instagram.com/alocubanokitchen/.
College Park Cafe: 2304 Edgewater Dr. in Orlando, 407-420-9892; collegeparkcafe.com/
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