Take a bite of Miami’s Cuban food
A delicious tour in Little Havana.
The scene: When visitors think about the food Miami is famous for, Cuban is at the top of the list – and the biggest concentration of Cuban restaurants and businesses is in the neighborhood known as Little Havana. The food here is delicious and varied, but choosing can be hard. That’s the beauty of the field trips offered by Miami Culinary Tours, a specialist in all things local and edible (long rated No. 1 in the city by TripAdvisor, and in 2018, the fifth-best food experience in the world).
These days just about every sizable city has food tour offerings – often on foot, sometimes by shuttle bus, sometimes by public transportation – and I’ve done them from New Orleans to Montreal to Tokyo. But Little Havana really lends itself to tours because it is such a compact, diverse and colorful neighborhood, easily explored on foot but full of hidden gems.
This tour stops at both classic and modern eateries, a market where visitors might otherwise miss out on an especially tasty experience, an art gallery doubling as boutique bar and a cigar factory. Visitors will also take in colorful murals and neighborhood institutions like Maximo Gomez Park, where locals play dominoes with unexpected fervor. In the process, you see things you probably would miss on your own and learn the cultural stories behind the food. Our guide was very informed – she used to live in Cuba.
Reason to visit: Medianoche sandwich, picadillo empanada, croquette, fresh sugar cane juice
The food: One of the great things about taking a food tour is that you don’t have to choose just one or two dishes, you get to graze and sample – in this case, classics of Cuban cuisine.
The tour started not with food but with a drink, Cuba’s most famous contribution to the cocktail canon: the mojito. The meeting place for the group (up to 14 people) was an art gallery on the main drag in Little Havana, Calle Ocho. The gallery has a small bar in the back, Agustin Gainza Arts & Tavern, better known as Taberna del Pintor (Tavern of the Painter). As the guests arrived and
the guide checked us in, the gallery owner painstakingly muddled fresh mint, lime and sugar in tall glasses before adding ice, rum and soda water, while telling us about his gallery. There were nonalcoholic options as well.
We moved on to the first real stop on the tour, El Pub, a large and popular corner restaurant with a pronounced local feel, where some regulars come every day. It’s like a Cuban diner or coffee shop, casual with booths and a large island counter to sit at, and decorated with a huge map of the island and quotes from famous Cuban poets on the walls.
Here we were served platters of delicious picadillo empanadas while our guide explained, “The most traditional filling is picadillo, ground beef cooked in sofrito, the holy trinity of Cuban cuisine.” Sofrito is a sauce made with onion, garlic and bell peppers cooked in tomato paste. The beef, as well as olives, are simmered in this sauce until everything is melded, and it looks like thick meat sauce or beef taco filling, but studded with green olives. This is then cooked inside flaky dough to make empanadas. These are fried, not baked, but not at all greasy, while the filling is thick but not heavy. They are handheld snacks: “If people see you cutting your empanada they know you are from out of town.”
At El Pub we also tried medianoches, pressed sandwiches with the same key ingredients as the better-known Cuban sandwich – roasted pork, Swiss cheese, yellow mustard and pickles – but instead of the crusty white roll used in the regular version, the medianoche uses a yellow egg-based sweet bread. I love Cuban sandwiches and have had many of them, but had never tried this sweet and savory twist. Its name translates to midnight, and is fittingly a popular weehours nightclub snack. The sandwich was great, and served with matchstick fries as crunchy as potato chips.
We washed this all down with a traditional Cuban coffee, an espresso-sized cup stirred with lots of sugar as it comes out of the machine, which gives it both a high level of sweetness and a unique texture, oddly different from simply adding sugar afterward. Locals drink it at all hours of the day, and many spots here, including El Pub, also have a little sidewalk window, known as a ventanita, serving them to go to passers-by, along with finger-food snacks. Most use the brand Cafe Bustelo, recognizable and nationally available, but born right here in Little Havana. Even the McDonald’s on Calle Ocho serves Cuban coffee.
The penultimate stop was my favorite and the most memorable, simply because I had never seen or tasted freshly pressed sugar cane juice before. At Los Pinarenos Fruteria, a market and fruit stand, the manager hand-fed long stalks of cane into an ancient-looking grinding machine, reminiscent of a wood chipper, made especially for this purpose. The juice, which could not have been fresher, was delicious.
The Little Havana Tour is offered three times daily around lunchtime, and costs $56.
Pilgrimage-worthy? Yes, in the sense that one of the half-dozen neighborhood food tours offered is a must for Miami visitors.
Rating: Yum! (Scale: Blah, OK, Mmmm, Yum!, OMG!)
Price: $$ ($ cheap, $$ moderate, $$$ expensive)
Details: Miami Culinary Tours; 786942-8856; miamiculinarytours.com