Cuba Libre featured in Orlando Home & Leisure
Cuba Libre: This is not your abuela’s kitchen. Cuba Libre started with a question: What would Cuban cuisine be like today if the island hadn’t been quarantined by the U.S. embargo for the past four decades? One possible answer lies in the menu of this new 20,000-square-foot theme restaurant in Pointe Orlando. Concept Chef Guillermo Pernot asked himself that question and decided that Cuban food would have assimilated many of the same influences – Asian, New American, African – that have rolled across the rest of the world’s culinary landscape. A two-time James Beard Award winner, Pernot is from Argentina but honed his craft in the American Nuevo Latino scene, first in Philadelphia and later in South Beach where he opened Gloria Estefan’s restaurant Allioli. Afterward, he returned to Philadelphia to launch the highly acclaimed Pasion! He eventually teamed up with the owners of two other Cuba Libre locations (Philadelphia and Atlantic City).
The result of Pernot’s culinary Q&A is definitely not your abuela’s Cuban food. There are layers of spices and combinations of flavors that she never dreamed of. This might best be categorized as Cuban Fusion, and, while it may shock palates conditioned to traditional congri and cangrejo, there’s a lot to savor on the menu.
Like the food, the restaurant itself is an idealized fiction – a theatrical take on 1950s Havana with a wide, wrought iron-bordered staircase that sweeps up from the first-floor rum bar past faux balconies backed by stained glass to a second dining room and function room upstairs. A sigh for La Floridita, one of Ernest Hemingway’s island haunts, juts from a wall, and there are arches fitted with heavy oak doors and decorative tile everywhere. While these may be atmospheric at best, other touches are more practical. The restaurant imports its own line of rums from Guyana, ranging from a light rum agricole on through a 21-year-old molasses-colored vintage. These are used in its 15 signature majitos. The classic incorporates guarapo (sugar cane juice) fresh from the restaurant’s cane press, but there are also mango, grilled pineapple and watermelon varieties – and even one energized with Red Bull. If only Papa had been around for that one, we might have a few more novels and another litter of grand starlets to thank him for.
The menu, executed here in Orlando by Chef Jason Kaufman, ranges from the familiar – ropa vieja and lechon asado served over a mofongo de yucca – to the entirely fanciful, such as papas rellenas with olive-and-raisin infused picadillo and guajillo pepper sauce. The sweetness of the picadillo is heightened by a hint of cinnamon and a Manchego crema.
“Most traditional Cuban dishes don’t use a lot of spice,” Kaufman notes, “and we think that’s one of the things that would have developed had Cuba remained free and not under embargo.”
Kaufman’s kitchen is unafraid of the garlic press, and the mofongo de yucca and chicharrones showed it prominently. Black bean hummus was accented by a noticeable shot of cumin, but other dishes were more subtly flavored.
“My favorite thing on the menus is probably the churrasco,” Kaufman says. It’s a good pick because it brings Cuba Libre’s conceptual underpinnings together in one dish. Citrus-marinated skirt steak, grilled and served with mashed potatoes is an Argentinean classic that has infiltrated menus across Central America and the Caribbean, with each culture redefining it locally. Cuba Libre grills the skirt steak and then finishes it with a parsley lemon onion sauce that heightens the beefy taste of the steak without overwhelming or hiding it. My steak was expertly grilled, tender and on the rare side of medium, just perfect in my book. If you’re a medium-to-well steak person, you should probably tell your server.
For a first timer, a good place to start would probably be the Plato Cha Cha Cha, which combines several of the restaurant’s signature items: the papas rellenas, chicken chicharrones, guava barbecue ribs, cangrejo (crab) cakes and black bean hummus with plantain chips. Most of these are also available as entrees, so it’s an ideal way to find your favorites. The guava ribs were fall-off-the-bone tender with a sweet-hot sauce. The cangrejo tortas had a light, crispy shell thickly filled with tender lump crab meat.
There’s also an entrée combination platter whose contents change daily. Mine was served with suntanned salmon: a moist mini-filet grilled with honey mango glaze. It was sweeter than I like my fish, but the grilled-on glaze gave the outside a satisfying crunch that contrasted nicely with the tender filet. The platter also came with masitas – chunks of pork simmered to tenderness and then deep-fried – and a good-sized sample of the churrasco accompanied by watercress salad and Moros y Cristianos (Cuba Libre’s version of congri).
There’s not respite after the meal either. The server offered dessert martinis (the Mulatta with Van Gogh Double Espresso, Cruzan Black Strap Rum, Kahlua Vanilla, Godiva Chocolate Liqueur and a Hershey’s Kiss), coffees (espresso, Americano, Bermuda coffee with Gosling’s Black Seal rum or the Nutty Captain with Captain Morgan, espresso and Frangelico) and a rempting range of desserts. While either the flan or a guava sorbet would have been a traditional closing act, I opted for Tres Leches, an iconic confection with which I’ve had some experience. I’ve eaten it in Calle Ocho, in the executive dining room of the Bacardi headquarters in Miami and in Havana itself. The Cuba Libre version may trump them all. As usual, the airy sponge cake is soaked in three kinds of milk, but Cuba Libre adds banana flavor to the milk, tops the cake with a crown of chocolate banana mousse and lays on two halves of a caramelized banana. Yeah, it tastes just as good as it sounds. It would be well worth the short walk from Pointe Orlando’s IMAX theater to Cuba Libre for an after-movie shot of aged rum and a plate of Tres Leches.
Being on I-Drive, Cuba Libre doesn’t have the urbane chic of the Elephant Bar, the neighborhood groove of Dexter’s or the rarified gentility of Victoria & Albert’s – but that’s not what it was designed for. There’s an outdoor bar with ample seating, a panoply of fine rums to sample and, on the weekends, Latin dancing downstairs. Couple that with the Old Havana atmosphere and a well-executed and adventurous menu and you have the makings of a pretty good night on the town. – Steve Blount