Who serves the best Cuban sandwich in Miami? The top burrito in San Francisco? Welcome to Taste of the Town, where we call on a local expert to share the best versions of one of their city’s most iconic foods. Here, local Miami critic Carlos Frías shares his picks for the city’s top Cuban sandwiches.
The surest way to get on someone’s bad side in Miami is to serve them a Cuban sandwich with salami.
That’s because there are three Floridas when it comes to Cuban sandwiches. And each claims it. Our identity is strangely (pathologically?) mixed up in the way we make our version across the state. We care too much about this sandwich in Florida—it’s weird, I know.
In Miami we expect a Cuban sandwich to have only five ingredients: sweet ham, mojo-roasted pork, dill pickles, tangy yellow mustard, and pungent Swiss cheese on Cuban bread. And—this is important—it should be buttered and toasted on a flat sandwich press until melty. No silly grill marks. (Save those for paninis.)
Tampa folks insist on adding salami. This debate always ends in hurt feelings. I call your attention to the Great Cuban Sandwich Crisis of 2012, when the Tampa City Council named a salami version their official sandwich. The Miami mayor scoffed that salami belonged on pizza (debatable).
Key West people like to add lettuce, tomato, and mayo. Nobody listens to them.
A group of scholars committed to actual research and wrote in The Cuban Sandwich: A History in Layers that the Cuban sandwich was born in Havana and morphed as it immigrated to different US cities. In a way, the Cuban sandwich became American.
And this is where our obsession comes from. This sandwich represents a lifeboat of a lost Cuban culture, one that exists entirely outside the sequestered island country of our parents. Memory is imperfect. But in this sandwich, we’ve all tried to preserve our past.
There’s one thing we can all agree on: Please don’t call it a Cubano unless speaking Spanish. You don’t have to try to code-switch for us. We won’t think less of you. Just call it a Cuban sandwich.
For me, here are eight versions that get it right.
Babe’s Meat & Counter
9216 SW 156th St.
Call it tip-to-tail sandwich making. At Babe’s, partners in life and lunch meat Melanie and Jason Schoendorfer make nearly every Cuban sandwich topping in-house, using quality ingredients from their butcher shop. Jason, whose great-grandparents owned one of the most famous bakeries in Cuba, Lucerna, takes a nontraditional approach to this Cuban. Babe’s brines and smokes Duroc ham and roasts the pork with Italian seasoning and onions. They brew hot English yellow mustard for tang, and finish with curried bread-and-butter pickles. Pressed on their flattop griddle, it emerges greater than the sum of its unexpected parts.
Babe’s Meat &
