KM
Keron McKenzie
6 days ago
On scorching day, the kind that turns Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard into a shvitzing procession of parked cars and hungry pilgrims, I steered my fiancée toward Rancho Alegre, unaware I was walking her down what was once West Broad Street, the beating commercial heart of Black Savannah.
Here the ghosts, if any, are dancing. A three-piece band of latin drunks worked a live music station in the corner that had my fiancée's hips moving before her body had caught up to the hostess stand. I ordered a mojito, one of the “best I've ever had, and sugariest,” swore the stranger ahead of me in line, unprompted. This benediction I chose to accept as gospel, and found it so correctly, bracingly minted that I was taken back fondly to a plastic table on a side street in Barranquilla some years back where a woman half my height and twice my wisdom and a rear end looking like two bowling balls badly stuffed into a leather duffel fried me an arepa de huevo so hot it nearly relieved me of a fingerprint.
Our server, a sun-bright young woman named Yasmin with the patience of a saint minding tourists who mispronounce ‘ropa vieja’ like it's a wine varietal, steered us expertly. Vaca frita first, seared to a curl at the edges like old parchment, its acid doing something almost violent and wonderful to the plantains beside it. Don’t even get me started on the empanadas de carne, which arrived blistered and weeping seasoned beef. Unreal. As for the rope vieja, it was fine, historically important, the one dish I wouldn't order twice.
The cortadito that followed arrived so dense and unapologetically fortified, that I finally understood why the people of Camagüey laid their city out like a drunken snail. The labyrinth’s of colonial streets built, they say, to disorient marauding pirates. I pictured some seventeenth-century buccaneer stumbling those crooked lanes not lost to cannon fire but to vices. Port to port, bottle to bottle, woman to woman, forgetting his ship, his gold, and eventually his own Christian name, undone not by the Spanish navy but by rum and a soul-slurping redhead in Camagüey.
We closed our Cuban lunch out right with a soaking tres leches wobbling as if it too had heard the band and wanted to dance.
¡Qué rico!