Your coffee on the sidewalk, before it was cool
The city of Miami is a fusion of Latin-and-everything and nowhere is that unique culture more alive than around the little windows that…
The city of Miami is a fusion of Latin-and-everything and nowhere is that unique culture more alive than around the little windows that open to the street to sell coffee and pastries.
Cortadito is a delicious, excruciatingly sweet, dark, small, frothy coffee with just enough evaporated milk to lighten it. Pastelito is a luscious puff of a million layers filled to the brim and ready to explode with guava paste dripping down the sides of each bite, baked with just a little extra sugar on top.
Here in Miami, azúcar is everywhere.
Many places have seen an entire culture move in and bring every last bit of the old country to the new. Chinatown in San Francisco, Little Italy in New York, Greek enclaves in Chicago and Levantines in Detroit. They all claim to be little-something and in that claim they transform their new place to meet Old country expectations. In Miami, that means reminding us a bit of the lechón asado that Abuela made.
Thus appears the Miami Ventanita. High end, Low end, bodegas, latin marts, supermarkets. South Beach, South Miami, Hialeah, El Portal, Little Havana. Ventanitas, those ubiquitous openings close to the espresso machine, whisking ten, twelve, maybe more teaspoons of sweet, sweet sugar with the first drops of the colada.
Frothing the sugar and the coffee and the still fragrant sixty year old memories of Old Havana which they might not even have seen in their lives.
Or in this life at least.
Then comes the shot. The sugar rush through the scorching South Florida summer. The same two pesos of a cafecito in the old country. The same pause, the same repose, in a different world.
Miami is not quite America but not quite home either. The scale of the buildings and the pace of urban life outran us decades ago but we adapted. Or we conquered, some might say, pervasive as we are, making things just a bit messy, just a bit spicy, and a lot more tasty.
The scale of the Ventanita reminds us of our own scale. All might be lost but the familiar smell of the cafecito in a tiny setting offers a glimpse of simpler, more human times.
Familiar city blocks get crushed under cranes and economies of scale and newcomers out of Seattle or San José.
But the Ventanita thrives, the two-peso cafecito is still alive, a fresh pastelito makes it all good. Queso y guayaba, please. Yatusabe.
The experience of Miami is the experience of the small scale Cuban culture, translated to this new world by Peter Pan, airlift, boatlift, wet feet, dry feet, old money remade, old friends refound; boleros, latin jazz, tabaco, pan con puerco y mojito. Translated to this brave new world where it has grown, where it has made a possible future from the one that was torn, choked, taken away back home. Translated to where that possible future burns bright. To where home became.
And nothing burns brighter than a Miami morning after a cortadito.