Fork It Over The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater-Mantesh by Unknown (rm book recommendations .TXT) 📕

the small room was Juan Gregorich, a drawn, sal-low man with deep lines in his face who had spent twenty-two years in jail as a political prisoner, although he admitted not all his actions had been nonviolent ones. He had burned a sugarcane field, written subversive graffiti, and aided anti-Castro guerrillas. For this he was sentenced to forty-nine years, but he was released in 1988. The four others were members of associations that track persons prosecuted and jailed for human-rights and political activities.

I pointed out how lovely everything in Cuba seemed to a happy tourist like me. Politely, careful not to offend, they informed me that they lived in a “terror regime” with paramilitary police and neighborhood informers, which is the reason I was able to enjoy the artificial calm that envelops Cuba.

Biscet called Cuba not a Socialist country but a totalitarian, Stalin-ist country, and said that he and his fellow protesters could go to jail for twenty years, or there could be “accidents” and they could be killed. They told me that in the old days they would already have been arrested, but the collapse of the Communist bloc and the loss of the subsidies from the former Soviet Union “have chained Castro’s hands tight—that’s why we haven’t been shot.” I went directly from the hunger strike to El Floridita, the most famous and expensive restaurant in Havana. Sitting in the quiet circular room, surrounded by red-jacketed waiters, felt very prerevolution.

The food served at El Floridita might not bring about the downfall of Castro, but I’m surprised it hasn’t liquidated tourism. It couldn’t be worse. The forty-two-dollar lobster thermidor came in a generic white sauce and tasted as though it had been made from frozen lobster, even though the local lobster is so prized only government-certified restaurants are permitted to serve it.

The “tournedos of beef Papa,” made with the limp, flavorless beef found in Cuba, were not edible. Ernest Hemingway has been elevated to the status of Havana’s most marketable icon, with Che Guevara (found on the collectible three-peso note) a distant second. The bar of F O R K I T O V E R

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El Floridita is filled with melancholy photographs of Hemingway with Spencer Tracy, Hemingway with Errol Flynn, Hemingway with Castro.

In the photos, he looks blurry, out of focus. The Hemingway daiquiri, served ungarnished in a tall glass, was a yellowish, unsweetened, cold sludge.

Of all the government-run restaurants I tried, only El Aljibe was interesting, in part because it looks like a cross between a Seminole Indian lodge and a Connecticut Indian casino. The one huge room, with a ceiling at least thirty feet high, seats hundreds, and almost everybody eats chicken. When I suggested to my waitress that I would like something other than the highly regarded chicken, she panicked, deserted her post, and had to be replaced. I assured the substitute that I’d be happy with the chicken, which was lemony and good. I also admired an odd but appealing Chinese restaurant called Chung Shan Los Dos Dragones, located about a block from the center of Havana’s tiny Chinatown section. It was always filled with customers, had a genuine liveliness no other restaurant could match, and offered the best dish for the money ($4.50) in Havana, lobster chop suey. I never was able to determine whether this place was sanctioned by the government or if the off-the-menu lobster chop suey was legal, but I went back several times.

The restaurants known as paladares are superior in almost every way to the government-run establishments, although almost none have air-conditioning, a debilitating deficiency. Paladares are twelve-seat (legal maximum) family-run (hiring outside help is forbidden) restaurants of surprising competence located in the foyers and dining rooms or on the patios and terraces of private homes. At almost all I visited, the spaces were comfortable, the food at least satisfactory, and the service totally charming—invariably, the youngest and prettiest woman in the extended family is pressed into waitress duty.

When a paladar offered fish, that’s almost always what I ordered, because fish cookery, for some reason, has survived in the home kitchen.

A French-style paladar called La Chansonnier had the best food overall, including rabbit in mustard sauce and admirable french fries. I 1 2 2

A L A N R I C H M A N

also liked Puerto Isabela, for its open terrace, unusually large menu, and two particularly skillful fish dishes—red snapper “primavera,” with a layer of finely diced vegetables covering the fillet, and red snapper “sobre-uso,” with an oniony tomato sauce. Puerto Isabela served an incredibly sweet but appealing dessert, a strong, monastery-style cheese with a choice of guava or coconut puree.

Although Cuba professes to be a nation free of racial prejudice—

one of Havana’s wistful sights is dark-eyed black street urchins in rags splashing through puddles alongside blond, blue-eyed white street urchins in rags—I encountered almost no blacks working in restaurants. Supposedly, whites, blacks, and mulatos are all accepted as equals, but I don’t recall being waited on by anybody who wasn’t light-skinned.

My search for a black-run restaurant took me to the wonderfully named Juana La Cubana, a paladar located in the rear of a building I never would have entered had my guide not patted my hand and assured me I’d emerge whole.

On the porch of this once-grand residence, shirtless men sat unsmiling in rickety chairs. They were not maître d’s. I nodded ingratiatingly as we approached, and their expressions did not change. Inside, a long hallway was lined with makeshift miniature apartments built of plywood or other scrap materials, and the marble floor was littered with broken couches and wobbly tables. (In Havana, much should be thrown out but almost nothing is.) I felt as though I had wandered into a shantytown where the luckless emerge blinking into the sunlight to forage for food, yet this was the site of a well-regarded local dining establishment. So popular is Juana La Cubana, located in a relatively large apartment