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Dine

Home cooking, Cuban-style

At the aptly named Cuban Delight Cafe in St. Petersburg, well-done standards share the menu with a little something extra.

By CHRIS SHERMAN
Published May 5, 2005

[Times photo: Bob Croslin]

Roast pork, rice, yuca and plantains are among the items available at Cuban Delight Cafe.

Florida has no use or need for a blazing hearth. We have Cuban food to warm our hearts.

Though Tampa has the greatest supply of modest steam-table home cooking, Pinellas has its sources too, places where the black beans are friendly and the chicken and yellow rice are the best of neighbors.

Yet there are special treasures among them, and one of the best, Cuban Delight Cafe, is hidden in the plainest stall of a small, mundane strip center. It is on 49th Street N, a secret foodie boulevard - fresh bread, crisp pizza, pierogies and kielbasa, as well as Biff burgers - too often overlooked by adventurous eaters and cooks.

The cafe seats perhaps 40 fortunate diners.

I sensed that I had lucked out when I saw that the day's specials under a sawbuck included calamari and rice. Good ropa vieja would have been enough, and they did have that, but calamari too?

Of course there's calamari in all the seas, the Spanish Main as well, and Cuban Delight served it chopped and cooked with rice in an inky mound. It looked more like black beans and white rice in the combination known as moros y cristianos, and tasted like a dry risotto, every grain enriched with the seafood. And the kitchen had the smarts to brighten the plate with crisp cucumber slices and plantains crisped into crunchy tostones.

About that ropa vieja: no complaints about the old standard. Beef pot roast cooked into shreds of its namesake "old clothes" was a full plate of meat and love blushing with pepper and cumin. Add black beans, and you could live for three days.

Cuban Delight doesn't slouch on beans. The black beans were thick and meaty on the plate or in a soup bowl. Red beans were maybe better, half of them creamed into a rich broth. In most Latin restaurants, bean soups can be a full meal. Here, even chicken noodle was homemade - think yellow stock, chunks of carrot and squash and potatoes and even chicken.

Roast pork, the prize entree in most Cuban restaurants, was worthy of pride, tender, moist and juicy with the flavor of long, careful cooking. At dinner you get more accompaniments than you need: rice, beans, yuca and plantains.

The true pigout is the Cuban sandwich grande, which adds glorious roast pork and provolone on top of a traditional Tampa Cuban, which already has salami pork and ham and cheese.

The only entree that left me wanting was chicken and yellow rice, because the style here seems to be to roast and broil the chicken separate from the rice. It's yellow enough, but both bird and rice were too dry.

Side dishes were great fun at small prices. Croquettes were lighter than air - moist, creamy chicken magically contained by thin, crisp shells. Tamales, which I loved purely for cornmeal, came with a bright, tart meat sauce that made me forget the carbs on the plate. The meal ended with a cup of espresso with foamy crema of equal perfection.

This is Cuban cooking with something extra. That extra appears to be the know-how and energy of Manny Tarazona, who took over the restaurant three years ago after moving north from Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. He's proud enough to bottle more than a half-dozen sauces under his own name, stock a small selection of wines (including half bottles of one of my faves, Ironstone Obsession) and serve that nifty ice cream frozen in Italianate fruit shells.

For most of us, Cuban food didn't need to get better. That it did is a delight.

-- Chris Sherman dines anonymously and unannounced. The St. Petersburg Times pays for all expenses. A restaurant's advertising has nothing to do with selection for a review or the assessment of its quality. Sherman can be reached at 727 893-8585 or sherman@sptimes.com

2950 49th St. N

St. Petersburg

(727) 328-7335

Hours: 9:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday; 4 to 8 p.m. Sunday

Details: Credit cards accepted; beer, wine served; no smoking; takeout, bottled sauces available.

Prices: $4.50 to $13.25.

[Last modified May 3, 2005, 14:10:06]