It was a fleeting moment, but one steamy night in August I made the best Cuban sandwich in the universe. I had assembled the culinary atomic bomb as a culmination of my obsession with Tampa’s Cuban sandwich.
I must have been 19 or 20 years old when it started. A friend brought me to the Blue Chair, a punky record store, looking for the latest Danzig album. I walked out onto the brick street and wondered at the strange dilapidated district called Ybor City. Walking around the dim hipster cafe and poetry slamming bookstore, I saw a sign for something called a Cuban sandwich. The Silver Ring Café, once a front for bolita, the local numbers racket, was by then an Ybor City snacking mainstay. It was the first discernible sign of Ybor City’s rich Latin culture I encountered. It was old hat to my friend, but for me, the pressed sandwich was an exotic artifact.
The sandwich I tasted that day was a local variant of a “mixto” or mixed Cuban sandwich. The term “Cuban sandwich” could describe many different things, and there is no truly definitive Cuban sandwich. One Tampa native insisted that the “original” was simply ham on buttered Cuban bread. Some proclaim the inclusion of turkey, and I indeed have found a reference to a turkey and tomato “Cuban sandwich” from the mid-1930s here in Tampa. If Cubans still eat sandwiches today, they certainly eat an altogether different mix on different bread. Still, most Tampans agree that a Cuban sandwich is ham, pork, salami, Swiss cheese, and pickles on long, old style Cuban bread. That’s the kind I ate at the Silver Ring.
I took that first toasty bite, a moment that set the sandwich benchmark for me. But I was also a bit let down. I had expected something less familiar, something more distinctive and romantic. Several years later, I began studying food and history as a graduate student. Smitten by Florida’s culinary crazy quilt, I became aware that the Silver Ring represented Tampa’s distinctive sandwich craft, where artisans crafted each main ingredient.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.