When I moved to South Florida three years ago, I made it a point to get to know Cuban food. I’d drive Miami’s streets and avenues and find myself in a strip-mall restaurant eating skirt steak, black beans and rice. With not a word of Spanish in my vocabulary, it was often an adventure. Luckily, I’ve got some Cuban-American neighbors, Flora and Juan, who are both about 90. Flora makes chicken and rice the way she remembers it, the way it’s supposed to be made.
So while I hesitate to call myself an expert, I know a thing or two about this often deceptively simple food.
At the Cuban Cafe in a strip mall in Boca Raton, it feels plenty Cuban. I don’t hear any Spanish, but I see people of all ages.
Decorative metal, cascaded with fake house plants, serves as intermittent dividers in the cozy dining room. There are Cuban travel posters on the walls, and the wait staff definitely looks to be of central-casting quality. Their accents are certainly authentic.
But then it starts to take too long for everything and all of this charm starts to wear thin. We know we’re not being too demanding when, having said nothing, we’re offered drinks on the house.
We start with an appetizer sampler ($10.95), two golden empanadas, croquettes, mariquitas and tamal. The tamal is the weakest of the four, not enough filling to even identify the central ingredient. But the empanadas are seasoned the way I like them, not too spicy. The plate also contains a pile of plantain chips that are fresh and not oily.
Live in South Florida long enough, experience enough Cuban food and you begin to crave beans and rice like mashed potatoes and gravy. Everything is here on the entree side of the menu, from ropa vieja ($9.95) to chicken every Cuban way you can imagine. There’s even a vegetarian offering ($9.95).
My co-diner orders lobster in garlic sauce ($18.95), a special of the day. The lobster is overcooked and there’s an almost acidic flavor in the dish, perhaps a wine of questionable quality, that makes it hard to enjoy. I love the sweeter-than-normal plantains that accompany each meal. Rice is cooked perfectly, but the black beans are underseasoned.
I order pork loin steak marinated in mojito sauce, bistec de puerco ($12.95). These are loin chops that are so thinly sliced they can’t help but soak up the flavor of the mojito. They are not so tender that they miss the authentic taste and are served with thinly sliced rings of onion.
And then we come to arroz con pollo ($6.95), a real bargain for one of Cuba’s most famous dishes. Like just about everything here, there’s nothing exceptional about it. The chicken borders on dry. The peas are gray. The flavors are there, but it just doesn’t hit it.
The usual suspects are on the dessert menu — rice pudding ($1.95) and flan ($2.25) included — but like all good Cuban food should leave you, we are feeling stuffed. Instead of the glass of wine that accompanied my co-diner’s entree, we are offered a piece of bread pudding. I have tasted some pretty sophisticated Cuban-style bread pudding, but this is a dense slice of sugary dough.
I’d read some previous reviews of the Cuban Cafe before dining here, and all of them raved. The restaurant is celebrating its 10th anniversary. But as my co-diner said on the way out: “Calle Ocho has nothing to worry about.”
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