All things considered, a Cuban sandwich seems a trivial thing. In the wealthy Cambridge, Massachusetts neighborhood flanking Harvard University, though, meat, cheese and bread under a press can raise questions of stewardship, personal politics, and the side effects of revolution. Less than two blocks apart, two very different restaurants here serve up their versions of the Cubano with divergent views of what matters, but an equal passion for the ultimate product. Food is funny that way. There’s a lot going on under the surface.
If you’ve never had one, a Cubano appears humble enough at first glance. A staple in Miami sandwich shops, crusty bread is overstuffed with slow-roasted marinated pork, ham, Swiss cheese, mustard and pickles, then grilled under a sandwich iron until everything is compressed into a coherent molten mass. Health food it isn’t. Rich and greasy, any traditional regional variations in its preparation seem to involve turning up the volume further, with more fat, more flavor, the Umberto Eco hyperreality of more. The Cubano has become a trademark of Cuban cuisine in the US at this point, a hearty working man’s meal that takes available ingredients and uses them to the best advantage.
If the Cubano is working-class food, then the Montrose Spa on Massachusetts Avenue is a proper place to buy one. Predating the spiraling rents of 1990s Cambridge, the Montrose is one of the dwindling pleasant urban rarities: an independently owned and operated neighborhood convenience store. Set in a line of upscale boutiques a few blocks from the local Starbucks, it sells bread, cigarettes, soda, the usual staples. Most people don’t even realize it’s there, and fewer still realize that its narrow deli counter puts out a heftily authentic Cuban sandwich.
“We were written up in the New York Times. We have people call from Logan [Airport] calling for sandwiches between planes,” says owner Eddy Tabit. A Cuban immigrant, Tabit came to the US in 1962. When he purchased the Montrose in 1974, it had already been a neighborhood concern for more than 20 years, and he’s visibly proud of the store and its product. Food is important to him. He waxes enthusiastically about the differences between his Cubano and those served in Havana. (For the curious, Mortadella wasn’t a standard part of the Havana sandwich, though it was a traditional ingredient on other parts of the island. It adds a peppery bite to the Montrose version.) He also has some interesting perspectives on the political realities that shaped what the sandwich was, contradicting the idea of the sandwich as a humble peasant standard.
“You’ve got to understand that after 1959, the Cubano didn’t exist in Cuba,” Tabit says. “We couldn’t get the ingredients.” Prior to the revolution though, he points out Cuba had the second highest per capita income in the world, just behind the United States. People were eating well, at least in Havana, and the Cubano was a popular item in several high class restaurants. Flush with money and success, Cuban chefs were training in Europe and the United States and bringing the techniques home. This might explain the similarities between the Cubano and the Italian panini sandwich, which is similarly pressed. Whether this is the origin of the sandwich is uncertain, but Tabit’s feelings about it aren’t. When I asked him what actually makes a Cubano a Cubano, he said: “The love you put into it…It’s from my old country and the new generation doesn’t know it.”
A short walk up the street, and you’re back in the high-rent reality of Cambridge. When chef Paul O’Connell opened his second restaurant Chez Henri in 1995, the address had been a French restaurant for well over 30 years, a Cambridge institution where Harvard students got their first taste of French food. At the time though, O’Connell was coming off his first restaurant, Providence, and he’d been exposed to Latin flavors working with Chris Schlesinger at the East Coast Grill. The bistro came with a handshake promise to the old owner to keep the food French. In the spirit of this agreement, the menu offers an inspired combination of traditional French dishes infused with Latin-inspired flavors. In Boston Magazine’s recent “Best Restaurant” issue, it’s telling that two of the thirteen chefs interviewed pointed to Chez Henri as their chosen destination for Latin food.
With these kind of reviews comes a price tag of course; entrees at Chez Henri start at $20 and go up from there. However, there’s also a bar menu for the lounge outside and in that space, O’Connell serves his own version of the Cuban sandwich. Similar in form to that of the Montrose, shaped by O’Connell’s personal philosophies about food, the humble concept is reworked into something entirely other.
The creation of a Chez Henri Cubano is a labor-intensive process. It takes the better part of two days to prepare the pork alone, a long brining overnight in molasses, rum, orange juice and spices, followed by seven hours or more in the oven at a low temperature. Labor has a price tag in the restaurant business, but this sandwich is made even more expensive by supplementary ingredients. The chipotle mayonnaise is made in the restaurant. The gruyere cheese that melds the ingredients together is imported from Switzerland. The pickles are a mix of dills and imported gerkins, which O’Connell points out aren’t cheap either. In every aspect, there’s an obsessive attention to detail, and to the quality of the ingredients. O’Connell says, “I did a Google search on Chez Henri, and people said ‘It’s great but so expensive’. But we are using local farmers, organic farmers…I’m not going to name names, but anyone can buy mesclun from California. For the prices we charge, our food costs are just pushing the outer edge, but part of being on the front line is you’ve got to be the first person to use this stuff. We do take chances here.”
Is it worth it? The Chez Henri Cubano is approximately twice the price of the Montrose version, though that includes a handful of root vegetable fries as a side dish. Each half of the sandwich is a double-handful; one sandwich is two meals even for a reasonably healthy eater. It’s everything you might hope a Cuban sandwich would be: salty, spicy, dairy and meat melded together under the heat of a grill until the flavors fuse into something greater than their component parts. It’s also a cardiologist’s nightmare; by the end of the meal, fingertips are near frictionless with the fats of the meats, cheese, and the butter used to coat the outside of the bread. Neither the Montrose Spa or Chez Henri’s sandwiches are about nourishment; both are about fulfillment. Most importantly, O’Connell’s dedication to technique and the classical definition of the sandwich is fulfilling an important role. Like Tabit, he’s offering a cultural artifact with the potential to change beyond recognition.
As mentioned above, the Cubano is one of the few Cuban dishes to make any kind of transition from its ethnic roots into the consciousness of American restaurants. While restaurants that serve Latin-inspired dishes have become more common in recent years, they face the challenge of an unfamiliar public, which O’Connell pointed out as he discussed the restaurants that tried and failed to sell similar concepts to the Boston market. “I’ve seen the Latin thing happen around here…. The biggest thing to overcome is that [Latin-American food] is not Mexican food. It is spicy, but it’s spice flavors, not hot spicy. People think hot, beans, rice, but it can be can be subtle, exciting, sexy.”
As with other so-called peasant dishes, there’s also a huge labor component involved. The manager of another local restaurant was frank when asked about why she wouldn’t add a Cuban sandwich to their regular menu: “In order to offer a good Cuban sandwich, you’ve got to have good, luscious, roast pork. Otherwise you should stay away from it. It’s the whole labor issue.”
This is the irony of many expensive restaurant meals; menu items we now think of as luxurious were the products not of affluence, but necessity and economy. Long marinating and slow roasting are traditional techniques for working with cuts of meat too tough to eat any other way. No matter the origin of the Cubano, there was always this investment of effort in its making. Even if it were originally the product of a home kitchen, the cost and effort of roasting and marinating the pork would suggest that the sandwich was created as a vehicle for leftovers. Last night’s roast became the next day’s lunch, spiked with a dash of lagniappe to make up for another day of eating the same thing. Now, it requires a restaurant’s resources and more importantly, a steady influx of customer capital to maintain such items as regulars on a menu. Faced with the cost, the labor, and the uneducated American palate, the path of least resistance is to mainstream the product as much as possible, eliminating the inconvenient and expensive aspects. This shortcut approach is already apparent when trying Cubanos from many chain and independent restaurants around the Boston area. There are sandwiches made with "artisan" breads, rarely grilled or even toasted, about as useful for retaining juices as a screen door. “That’s my biggest complaint with a lot of places,” says O’Connell. “The cheese isn’t melted. Did your mother ever make a grilled cheese sandwich without melting the cheese?” The cost and labor of roasting pork is sufficiently unattractive to the bottom line that many restaurants have fallen back on roast turkey as a substitute. One particularly memorable Boston Cubano included the dubious addition of corned beef, honoring the little-appreciated Irish influence on Cuban cuisine. To be fair, there are certainly restaurants that make a game attempt to provide an authentic, or at least enjoyable Cubano. However, unless you’re certain the cook has a deep-seated personal opinion about Elian Gonzales, you’re risking disappointment.
Odds are good that you will always be able to find a good Cuban sandwich somewhere, of course. Cuban-American culture remains vibrant, and in touch with the history and quality of their food, particularly in cities like Miami with strong immigrant populations. Once in the mainstream however, the qualities that make the Cubano, or indeed any cuisine admirable can fall by the wayside. The end result may be edible, perhaps even enjoyable, but it will bear little resemblance to its original form. That changeling, for better or worse, will then be looked to as the defining qualifier for the cuisine as a whole. Consider the centuries of history and culture inherent in real Mexican cooking, a labor-intensive tradition that often uses mean materials to create dishes of incredibly subtle intricacy. Contrast this with the mechanized squeeze-bottle assembly line of the local Taco Bell and you can see this process taken to its absurd extremes. Crossing over successfully on a larger scale requires individuals willing to consider that there are other values in the making and selling of food besides maximum profit. For Tabit, that inspiration comes from a dedication to a remembered past. For O’Connell it’s a single-minded focus on the quality of his ingredients and the purity of his technique. In either case, that two restaurants, far removed from the center of Cuban-American culture are willing to look beyond the bottom line to offer something authentic is a cause for celebration.
O’Connell and Tabit are neighbors and know each other well enough that competition isn’t an issue, even if they did have a “Cubano Taste-off” a few years back. Chez Henri walked away with that trophy, but neither man seems inclined to take the victory too seriously. The Cambridge lounge-dweller who bites into a sandwich in the Chez Henri bar is experiencing the same level of passionate commitment to the product as the student who scrapes the last quarter out from under the couch to buy his sandwich at the Montrose. And in both cases, they’re going to be too full to care.
