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Review: Tampa's Café Martí gets to the heart of Cuban food

 
Like several dishes at Café Martí, the arroz con pollo with yellow rice is served with cooked collard greens.
Like several dishes at Café Martí, the arroz con pollo with yellow rice is served with cooked collard greens.
Published Dec. 23, 2014

TAMPA

Rodney Rodriguez was a professor of Spanish at Manhattan College. But in September he and his brother, Ricky, launched Café Martí at the site of a former Papa John's on Gandy Boulevard. As second acts go, it's a pretty big flying leap. But for this Tampa native, it made its own kind of sense.

"We'd always like the foods of our heritage and we felt that a lot of Cuban food here was from exiled Cubans. It was food in a time warp, very different from the food that developed later in Cuba. We're using the recipes of our grandparents, who were all born in Tampa and of Spanish heritage."

Honoring Cuban national hero José Martí, it's a clean, bright cafe with simple decor and earnest, solicitous young servers. Menu items will be mostly familiar, but it's the Rodriguezes' attention to detail that sets it apart.

Take the classic Cuban sandwich, part history lesson, part lunch: "We're firm believers in the salami, which is definitely an Italian influence. There was quite a large German colony in Tampa — it turns out what they did was design the cigar boxes and paint those beautiful art nouveau designs — I've heard the pickle is a German influence. We use the pork that we used to eat with our dinner, and we don't use boiled ham, but rather real ham. Mustard, mayo, Swiss cheese — I don't know why Swiss cheese, but that's what it was — and bread from La Segunda Central. It's a real fusion."

And a good sandwich, offered alongside a number of other sandwiches bedded down on La Segunda, from a blackened tilapia Floridano sandwich to the Argentino with filet and chimichurri.

Because of the dwindling number of places to grab a café con leche, I headed to Martí first for breakfast, settling in with a rich, unctuous cup just foamy around the edge and accompanying it swiftly with the Cuban version of huevos rancheros, softly over-easy eggs piled on toasted Cuban bread with kicky salsa and a cup of mellow black beans.

But it's really at dinnertime when the restaurant shines, with subtly exotic versions of old standbys. There's picadillo a la criolla ($9.95, also at lunch for $6.95), made in the Spanish style with Arab influences, the meat dotted with piquant elements: capers, raisins and olives. For vegetarians there's a pisto manchego ($9.95) made with zucchini, eggplant and tomato, flavored with Spanish pimenton (smoked paprika), which lends a savory, almost meaty heartiness.

Boliche ($13.95) is done in the Rodriguez family's traditional style. Because eye of round can get dry, most folks stuff it with chorizo. Here it's stuffed with pieces of pork belly along with the gently spicy sausage to give it a plusher, richer fattiness. Slow-roasted in a red wine sauce, it is plated simply with white rice and fried plantains.

A number of dishes, such as the arroz con pollo ($2.95), come with cooked collard greens, not, as Rodriguez points out, a nod to the South. It's more a traditional Spanish accompaniment, a nice veg alternative to the super-starchy regular Cuban lineup (tostones, fried green plantains, rice).

For now the cafe doesn't have a wine and beer license, so you are welcome to BYO and sometimes they pour a little gratis sangria. Portions aren't as vast as some longtime Ybor Cuban spots, but the ingredients are high quality and the prices are reasonable. Café Martí is geographically far from the heart of Tampa's Cuban hub, but it shows a great deal of Cuban heart nonetheless.

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Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley on Twitter. She dines anonymously and unannounced; the Times pays all expenses.