Cuban Chicharrones: One of Cuba's Primary Gifts to the World

Cuban chicharrones in a gas-station where we get our Cuban sandwiches in Tampa, Florida.

I'm a Cuban sandwich freak and I think Cuban food is pretty good too, but holy crap, these chicharrones were GOOD. My dad and I put a bunch of lime on them and topped them off with some Tapatio hot sauce - freshly fried, a little bit of meat hanging on them - and inhaled them in roughly five minutes while waiting for our sandwiches to be made.

I am now desperately seeking a Cambodian equivalent. As for where this place is in Tampa? I think somewhere off Hillsborough. But honestly, I think that as far as neighborhood Cuban delis go, sometimes you just gotta find your own.

Franciale: Good God I Love Cuban Sandwiches

Franciale
5635 Memorial Hwy
Tampa, FL
813-249-7227



My earliest food memory involves a Cuban sandwich.

I was out in the wood-chipped and (to my four year old eye) extremely large backyard at the Learning Tree Preschool, and for some reason, someone, somehow, had brought Cubanos. The Cuban is Tampa's most beloved native culinary treat, surpassing snackies like deviled crabs, Cuban bread and butter, and Hooters chicken wings, and they inevitably show up at any social event or gathering in the region, cut into triangles and laid out on the table. In any case, I vividly remember eating this thing, and I remember the flavor of it - new and unusual indeed to a person who has not yet been properly introduced to concepts like "mustard" and "pickles - and I was immediately charmed, devoted, pleased. Salami, cheese, roast pork, ham, pickles, mustard, and cuban bread, pressed and toasted until melty and delicious - this might indeed have been the very gnosis or beginning point of my life long food obsession, the point from which all else radiated. Maybe I should credit the sandwich itself as one of my very first mentors.

Okay, that could be going too far. Long story short. Them things taste good. Real good. I was in Tampa this June, visiting my grandparents (who live off Dale Mabry) and I had to get myself a Cuban. There was a second motivating factor: i had just survived a particularly aggressive bout of food poisoning, and I felt a powerful and near reptilian urge within myself to restore my fluids, to bump-up my electrolytes, to heal myself. What better food to do that then a ridiculously huge sandwich? Thought so.

Franciale is located in a Shell station. When you pull in, it doesn't look like a damn thing like a restaurant. In fact, it looks more like a front for a cunning yet down-trodden Cuban drug running operation. The front is a standard 7-11 type food shop with a bunch of dusty candy bars and a startling selection of pork rinds. The actual cafe counter is near the back and seems to be staffed exclusively by one Umberto, a highly energetic and extremely friendly Cuban-Italian guy, who has decorated his three table dining room with romantic 1970's posters of Pisa, Rome, and Sicily. There's a selection of Cuban dishes on the menu, but you should probably go for the Cuban.



Which is a fantastic Cuban, the best I've ever had. The pork is slow roasted in citrusy mojo sauce and falling-apart tender, and when combined with a giant hunk of buttered Cuban bread, nice quality ham, cheese, and salami, a boatload of mayo and mustards, and some crunchy lettuce and tomato - heaven on earth. Umberto makes the sandwich and presses it right in front of you so there's no doubt about the vintage of the ingredients. "You gonna eat that entire thing?" the high school football coaches (as I'd figured out by overhearing their conversation) asked me, when the puppy-sized monstrosity was handed to me.

"I can try," I said, vaguely. I figured I would eat half.

But I needed to restore my electrolytes and animal spirits, so I fell to the sandwich with an almost obscene vengeance. It was gone in about four minutes, the entire damn thing. The football coaches were sharing a single, and looked at me with something close to horror in their faces when I was done. "Good lord, you did finish it," the older one said. "That's incredible."

"I was very, very hungry," I said. This was probably obvious.

Umberto high-fived me on the way out.

I felt infinitely better, as if the dismal day of food poisoning had not actually happened but was in fact an unpleasant memory belonging to someone else. I drowsed the rest of the day, in the manner of a golf-course alligator that has just gorged itself upon a fat and complacent Labrador.

I love Cuban sandwiches.

cochon butcher: om nomnom sammiches om nom

Cochon Butcher
930 Tchoupitoulas
New Orleans LA
504-588-PORK

Cochon Butcher is Donald Link's sandwich shop. This is not in of itself particularly unusual: seems like many big-name and well known chefs are opening casual, lunchy renditions of their flagship eateries in cities across America, dishing up sandwiches, small plates, and snacks to a hip and culinarily adventerous crowd. Butcher has been a particularly successful member of the club - New Orleanians love their sandwiches, and they love sandwiches featuring a copious amount of pig products even more. Game, set, match. Besides sandwiches, Butcher provides a rotating selection of "bar food," with specialities changing with the season and what looks good at the market. The other half of butcher is the deli: customers can pick up house-made cured meats, dressed and ready to cook meat products, and choose from a bunch of ready-to-go take out items. Handy!



This is an arugula salad with a preserved lemon dressing and slices of lomo, dried Spanish-style pork loin. Donald Link prides himself on his European style cured meats, and this flavorful, salty lomo was a fine example of his work. Link has done some study in Italy and Spain on the techniques required to create this stuff, and it seems to be paying off.



I was born in Tampa, and my earliest food memory honest-to-God involves a Cuban sandwich. I remember the salami and the pickles, and the melty cheese, but mostly I remeber it being good. So of course we got the pressed cochon de lait Cuban sandwich, ($10) served with housemade potato chips. Verdict? A tasty, toasty rendition of the classic, featuring Link's always impeccable roast pork, ham, salami, and plenty of mustard and pickle. But there was one problem: there's a cilantro spread on the sandwich that wasn't listed on the menu board, providing my cilantro loathing mother with a nasty surprise. Be more precise, black-board menu writers! Think of those that walk among us with that horrible soapy-mouth cilantro mutation!



These are marinated brussel sprouts ($6.00) and they were excellent. I believe they are briefly fried and then set to marinate in vinegar, mint, sugar, chili, and a couple other herbs - they come out delightfully fatty, bitter, sweet, and herbacous all at once and are entirely addictive, superior to potato chips.




My friend Cassidy was feeling brave, and went with the Cochon banh mi ($10.00) with liver pate, hogs head cheese, and pickled vegetables on a French roll. This is a truly classic Vietnamese sandwich combination, and all those funky meat products within created an unctuous, fatty, and delightfully porky experience, in tandem with the vinegary vegetable slaw. For god's sake, don't hold the mayo. The stuff really brings this sammich together. Highly recommended, even if you are technically adverse to eating the head of a hog. Open your mind, your ass will follow, etc etc etc.

We bought a chunk of Butchers (in)famous bacon praline for dessert, and unwrapped it in the car. It was dumbfounding. Pretty much everyone present compared the experience to kinky sex, rather like making love to some unholy but delectable combination of pure essence of pig and sugary maple candy pecan horror. That's about the gist of it. Try it and find out. Try it.

We used Butcher for my graduation party and everyone was pleased with the results. Smoky turkey and andouille gumbo, meaty collards, some awesome cheese-and-crab dip and a lovely boucherie plate kept my crew of friends and associates fed and somewhat complacent. Thanks, y'all.

Squeal Barbecue: A Pleasant Oasis of Smoked Meat

Squeal Barbecue
8400 Oak Street
New Orleans, LA 70118-2046
(504) 302-7370

Squeal Barbeque on Oak Street is, properly speaking, an outpost. This is because New Orleans is not a barbeque town. This reality mystifies non-Southern tourists who (perhaps influenced by our reputation) consider the South to be a hotbed of delicious smoked meat products, a magical land where ribs and pulled pork are cooked up on just about every corner, by folks possessing a whole lot of local "character". We have much in the way of Local Flavor in New Orleans, perhaps too much, but a profusion of good barbeque? Not so much.

So I was heartened when Squeal opened, doubly so when I saw that they had an honest-to-God smoker going on their front porch. That they had at least obtained the apparatus of good barbeque. This warranted investigation.

Squeal hits the classic barbeque bases on the menu, that's for sure: smoked ribs, pulled pork, chicken, and sausage are all in evidence, as are collards, grits, hush puppies, and french fries. But the kitchen has ambitions somewhat beyond that of the archetypical rural-South BBQ shack, and it shows: specialities like smoked pork cakes with salsa, a riff on shepherds pie with (you guessed it!) pork and pig-topped nachos are all in evidence, as well as some not-totally half assed salads.



My dining companion and I decided to stick with the classics, being purists, or at least somewhat poor. I went for the half smoked chicken with macque choux (a New Orleans sort of sauteed corn) and collard greens ($12.95). Everything gets accompanied by hushpuppies. Verdict? A pretty worthy effort. The chicken was tender and had a good smoky flavor, and avoided the trap of over-cooking or not-smoky enough flavor that chicken tends to fall into. The sauce is a little sweet for my taste and I maintain there was too much of it - admittedly, for the bulk of consumers, there can never be too much sauce. Well, there are always more infidels then true believers, out there. (My father hails from North Carolina and can provide ample evidence of Southern BBQ as being a very real and very intense religion, divided into warring sects, all of these self-same sects possessing doctrine, minor and major deities, stories of sacrifice and redemption, and vicious philosophical schisms. But I digress). The collards, always a concern of mine, were excellent. This is a kitchen that understands the holy union between greens and pork products.



My friend went for the pulled pork and green onion sausage combo ($13.95), with french fries and baked beans. The pulled pork was pretty good, if not great: nice smoky flavor, but a little dry and not possessed of the crispy just slightly burned bits that send good shoulder over the top. Also, too much sauce on top. Such an affliction. The sausage was very tasty - they need to serve these things on rolls outside the Maple Leaf at 2:00 AM, to the drunken hordes. There's money in them there hills. Beans were deemed "all right." French fries were twice fried and embarrassingly delicious. Kudos.

On the whole, Squeal provides entirely reputable barbeque in a town that is a barbeque wasteland - and the convenient location smack dab on Oak Street makes it a swell launching off point for a night spent wandering Uptown. The price-serving size equation is extremely attractive to the poor and carnivorous college student sect, and there's plenty of craft beer on tap to wash things down with. We ate out on the porch on a lovely and slightly limpid summer afternoon and could easily have lingered there for hours. We had a rubber snake on the table we had found in the car, which the waitress thought was real, and we all laughed a bit nervously together, as she brought us an ash-tray. Still, nice, so nice outside. Something about the smell of smoked meat on the horizon, Pall Malls from a brief distance, and gardenias from the garden next door arrests my ability to move. (We can't smell the oil in the air. Yet. Some people I know claim they can, but I think they're lying, it's psychosomatic for now. Maybe it's coming.) Eat at Squeal, is what I'm trying to say.