Garlic, Grease and Yuca? Yum!
I told a Cuban friend I’d had vaca frita at Havana on Sunset. “That’s my favorite dish! But I only have it when my mother’s in town,” she groaned. “You never see it on a restaurant menu!”
It’s easy to guess why. Restaurants prefer neat, easy things to cook, and vaca frita is a mess. Braised flank steak is teased into shreds, then fried with onions and bell peppers. It’s a celebration of browned flavors, like a heavily fried Mexican machaca, and there’s no way to make it without grease flying all over.
Let’s stipulate that Versailles, thanks to some special occult technique, makes the best Cuban roast pork in town. And we can agree that there are far better sources than Havana on Sunset--starting with Porto’s Bakery in Glendale--for Cuban sandwiches. (The restaurant evidently lacks the requisite device to simultaneously toast and press the bread.) But Havana on Sunset has the most ambitious Cuban menu and the most sophisticated style. We’re in Hollywood here, among the shops that ring the Metropolitan Hotel. There are live Cuban music in the bar on Friday and Saturday nights and a counter selling rum and cigars, those symbols of Cuban high life.
Cuban food has strong roots in Spain, which show here particularly in an exuberant love of garlic. The standard side dishes are rice, good ham-scented black beans and a choice of fried plantains or slices of yuca root with a squirt of garlic on top. A lot of dishes have a very good spicy tomato sauce, much thicker and more flavorful than you usually find in Latin American restaurants.
The appetizers you expect at a Cuban place are chicken or ham croquettes, empanadas filled with ground beef, and fried codfish balls. They are all perfectly good here--the codfish balls are nicely browned, the ham croquetas intriguingly spiked with bits of pickle. But there are more interesting choices, such as tostones rellenos: plantain chips fried into a cup filled with shrimp in spicy tomato sauce. Or papas rellenas, fried mashed potato balls so fluffy they look like angel food cake with a crisp browned crust. The most amazing appetizer is the tamal relleno. Yes, it’s a Cuban tamale. You know that because you can get it with a ham filling, and because the sauce is nothing but a jolt of garlic.
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There’s always a soup of the day, such as the filling white bean soup caldo gallego. You get soup or salad with any entree, and the default chicken soup is irresistible. There are some peas, rice and carrots in it, but it’s mostly chicken--with old-fashioned boiled chicken flavor--so thick that it’s practically a chicken stew.
The chicken entrees all seem good. You can get arroz con pollo borracho, a generous portion of chicken and tomato rice, or chicken fricassee, half a large bird stewed with olives, raisins, chunks of potato and some of that good tomato sauce, spiked with wine.
They have boliche mechado, a slightly chewy steak rolled around a little ham and pork sausage and stewed in tomato sauce with red wine. And roast pork of course, with a more prominent citrus flavor than that at Versailles. It comes with moros, a succulent reddish mound of rice and beans.
There’s a seafood section, of course, where you see familiar-looking treatments such as camarones enchilados, shrimp stewed in a rich, slightly peppery tomato sauce. You can find more in the section marked especialidades, such as paella and calamadres rellenos (squid stuffed with crab). Pollo Vista Alegre, a dish of the pre-Castro Cuban resort cuisine, is also stuffed with crab, and topped with asparagus and cream sauce: elements that are all OK in and of themselves but don’t add up as well as you’d expect.
The entree you might least think you’d like is fufu de platano, which is just a mush of pureed green plantains with fried plantain chips sticking out of it. But it’s powerfully appealing if you like garlic, with which it reeks. On top of that, it comes with garlicky yuca.
The dessert section is short, but there’s a creamy flan and a surprisingly good pudding (majarete) of finely ground cornmeal, richly scented with canela cinnamon.
So anyway, I took my Cuban friend and she ordered the vaca frita. It wasn’t as good as Mom’s, she said, but still . . .
BE THERE
Havana on Sunset, 5825 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 464-1800; fax 957-4237. Open 11:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2-9 p.m. Sunday. Full bar. Parking lot. All major cards. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $32-$90. What to Get: croquetas de jamon, tostones rellenos, vaca frita, chicken fricassee, fufu de platano, majarete.