A Taste of Cuba in Montrose

Bob and I have been dining often at Havana Beach Cafe lately because the owners, Mel and Connie Barauskas, added my favorite Cuban treat to the menu - the media noche sandwich. The menu has always included a grilled Cuban sandwich made with the same ingredients as the media noche - ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese and pickles.

The Cuban sandwich is enfolded in crispy-crusted Cuban bread. The media noche requires a similarly thin bread, but it's a sweet bread, a little like egg bread with a shiny smooth crust. I think sweet bread complements the meat.

Years ago, I asked Mel in his original cafe on Verdugo Road, "Why no media noche?" Mel said the locals weren't familiar with Cuban food. Most of his patrons of Cuban heritage came for the heartier, traditional dinner entrees.

Times have changed. The restaurant moved into spacious quarters on Montrose's main drag, Honolulu Avenue. Locals developed a taste for Cuban specialties and the media noche is now available.

While sipping our sangrias at HBC, we've been reading "A Taste of Cuba," by Beatriz Llamas. A native of Spain, Llamas taught cooking classes and ran a catering business in Madrid. Now she lives in Havana with her husband and three children. Her book is colorfully illustrated with charming drawings by Ximena Maier.

From the opening chapter of the book, we learned that Cuban cuisine is a mix of tastes and ingredients imported by successive waves of settlers. The original native inhabitants of the island supplemented their diet of cassava, sweet potato, corn, black beans, fish and occasionally game. Decimated by European illnesses, most of that native population disappeared. Ingredients imported from Spain, particularly olive oil, supplemented the staples of their diet.

With the arrival of African slaves, okra, taro root, plantain and new seasonings were added to the cuisine. Later, French coffee plantation owners contributed new cooking methods and refinement. Chinese workers arrived on the island in the middle of the 19th century with soy sauce and white rice.