One dish at a time, our city demonstrates its diversity
By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published October 9, 2004
The Friday before the most recent hurricane, we went with friends to China Yuan on Armenia near Waters. It was full, and almost everyone there was Asian. It's one of those places, like in a Chinatown, where round tables accommodate large parties, usually families with friends and kids, and there's a revolving disc in the center that is, in effect, a lazy Susan, passing the dishes around the table. Whole barbecued ducks and chickens hang from their feet in a case toward the back.
If you want dessert, you can walk over to the Oriental Bakery in the same strip center and buy a big round almond cookie or any of the pastel pastries. In this center there's also a Peruvian restaurant and nightclub, an Asian market and I don't remember what else. Driving on Armenia, you pass every kind of Latin American restaurant and market - Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican. There's a Vietnamese restaurant, too. In fact, for miles the whole street is almost entirely non-Anglo.
This is a neighborhood where I feel I'm living in a real city. It's the way I used to feel about Columbus Drive, which at one time was called Boliche Boulevard, and the old Ybor City before it was developed into a mall. When I first arrived in Florida, I would drive from St. Petersburg to eat arroz con pollo at the old Latam on Columbus or Alvarez in Ybor, but the attraction wasn't so much the food as it was the flavor of the place, the diversity.
After dinner, our friends wanted to go to Viva La Frida to hear the Michael Ross Quartet. Michael Ross taught bass to their son, and they told us LaRue Nickelson, the guitarist in the group, had taken second place in this year's competition for best unsigned jazz guitarist under 30 at the Montreaux Jazz Festival.
You never now what you'll find at Viva La Frida, the restaurant/club/gallery/whatever in Seminole Heights. Inside it's a restaurant and gallery, but the large open-air patio outside is host to all kinds of things. In the next couple of weeks there will be an Alley Cat Players production of Macbeth and a lunch chat with alternative journalist David Barsamian, talking about "Four More Weeks or Four More Wars." So you see what I mean.
That night, the Ross Quartet was playing outside. There was a birthday party at a long table of about 20, mostly girls in their teens in teeny tiny skirts, everyone talking in Spanish. People were scattered at the smaller tables eating dinner or drinking sangria. We were at the farthest table from the band, so we could see everyone, and it seemed like no one else was really listening.
Which was strange, because the group was fabulous. Nickelson was as good as billed, but also Ross and David Pate on saxophone and Walt Hubbard on drums were fantastic. This is straight jazz, not a hybrid. The group has a CD coming out in about three weeks called Year of the Dog with original tunes written by Ross and Nickelson. You'll be able to buy it at www.michaelrossquartet.com Or hear MRQ at Viva La Frida the first two Fridays in November. We stayed until the band closed down.
This late at night it was cool, especially with the hurricane winds starting to come through. On the way home driving down N Florida, we stopped at Mauricio Faedo's bakery. It's open 24 hours a day Monday through Friday. Bakers were still at work at the long tables and the huge room was full of carts loaded with long, skinny loaves of Cuban bread with the palm fronds on top.
We asked for one when three Latino guys came in. "I didn't know it would be open!" one was saying.
He saw me looking in the bakery case and asked, "Did you get one of those?" He was pointing to the guava pastries. "You've got to get one!" he said. "They're delicious."
He said they had just arrived from Port St. Lucie, running from the hurricane. His aunt lived a couple of blocks from here.
I bought one, of course. How could I not?
As we got in the car, the bakers were leaving. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to midnight.
As we headed down Florida, eating the guava pastry, its crust flaking onto the car seat, I thought: Is this a great town, or what?
Sandra Thompson, a writer living in Tampa, can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
