Pambiche
2811 NE Glisan, Portland, Oregon, (503) 233-0511
In a saner world, or just one where common sense prevailed a little more often, instead of vacationing at Disneyworld, we’d be in Cuba, dancing the rumba, drinking mojitos, and eating what food scholar Raymond Sokolov calls the “most original” New World cuisine. But because of our hypocritical 40-year vendetta against the man who only wanted to free his country from a tyrannical oligarchy fueled with dollars from mafia-run casinos, you can go to jail for spending money on the proud, impoverished little island that should be a paradise.
Pambiche provides a taste of what Cuban cuisine once was and could be. Long before the revolution, the embargo, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the collapse of sugar prices in the early 1990s, cooks on Cuba (as well as the neighboring islands of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic) built a cuisine from scratch. In his book Why We Eat What We Eat, Sokolov, who’s written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Natural History magazines, documents the evolution.
In the wake of Columbus, Spanish colonists decimated the native Taino population and erased any memories of indigenous cooking. Old world tastes and new world foods such as tomatoes and corn combined with African flavors and native plants like yucca and sweet potatoes. The Spanish fleet roamed the seas and brought foodstuffs from Europe and Asia. Sokolov writes that “a world empire poured its ingredients into an empty bowl and whipped up a menu unlike any that had existed before.”
John Connel-Maribona, Pambiche’s Cuban-American chef and owner, calls the food “comida criolla,” or creole cuisine. I call it delicious. Start with the selection of appetizers, which includes foods that go back to the very beginning of Cuban cooking. Both the fritters (frituras) and croquettes (croquetas) descend from West African accra, a fried dumplng made from split peas that spawned innumerable spin-offs throughout the islands. Pambiche’s are hot and crispy, the croquetas filled with ham or chicken, the frituras with corn or squash.
Papas rellenas are another version, this time made from mashed potatoes wrapped around the slightly sweet ground beef and vegetable mixture called piccadillo, rolled in breadcrumbs, and fried to a deep brown, with a satisfying crunch that yields to soft interior. Some people find the fried green plantains called tostones a little too starchy, but I liked them, especially with the shockingly red, slightly spicy Filipino banana ketchup.
An order of yucca frita should be mandatory. Yucca (aka manioc, breadfruit, cassava, or tapioca) is the starchy carbohydrate that provides the bulk of the calories for poor people between the horse latitudes around the world. It’s ground into flour and pounded to a sticky paste. Fermented, it provides an intoxicating beverage. The spherical pellets of yucca starch called tapioca make a great if old-fashioned dessert. At Pambiche, the tuber is fried and tossed with a garlic sauce; the result is sort of like a moist, flavorful plate of home fries, but different and better.
Both red beans (with an ingredient the menu calls “el secreto del sabor” that is probably some kind of pork) and the vegetarian black beans derive their satisfying flavor from a Spanish-style sofrito, a slow-cooked blend of garlic, onions, and green peppers. The salads are all composed—not a lettuce leaf in sight. Red and green cabbage with grated carrots in an herby citrus dressing provides a cleansing crunch, while the avocado and red onion contrast mellow creamy with crispy hot.
The most well-known item in the stateside Cuban culinary repertoire is a pork sandwich, ex-pat fast food from Miami to New York. The Pambiche version includes a slice of adobo-marinated roast pork, Black Forest ham, Swiss cheese, and dill pickle, all layered into a mustard-spread roll that’s toasted in a sandwich press. It comes out compressed, the cheese slightly melted, the hard outer crust of the roll cracked and warm, and wonderfully tasty.
The roast pork shows up again on the plato Cubano, alongside black beans, rice, and a side of yucca frita. The same lineup, without the meat and including a little of the cabbage salad, is called plato Comunista and described as the “contemporary Cuban plate” without a hint of sarcasm.
Slowly cooked flank steak flavored with lots of garlic, ropa vieja gets its name from a supposed resemblance to old clothes. It tastes much better. Picadillo combines ground beef with garlic and peppers flavored with cumin, oregano, olives, and raisins. Spanish sherry adds to the spicy-sweet blend, and the mixture is served over a mound of rice. Chef Connel-Maribona pays homage to Mama Ivonne with lengua en salsa, slices of tongue simmered fork-tender in a tomato and pimiento sauce flavored with mild chiles and toasted almonds.
Connel-Maribona worked as a pastry chef in several restaurants, including Papa Haydn, and his desserts at Pambiche rival anything in town. They range from classic European pastry forms imbued with tropical flavors to traditional simple sweets. At one end you’ll find la banana borracha (the drunken banana), banana cake soaked with dark Meyer’s rum and banana liqueur and torta domino, a white chocolate and mocha torte with espresso, Kahlua, and chocolate mousse topped with a chocolate domino. At the other are arroz con leche, a lemony rice pudding, and chocolate-dipped macaroons called coquitos.
The 75-year old concrete building that houses Pambiche looks like it would fit right into the time-warped neighborhoods of Havana, especially if you parked a ‘54 Ford our front. Even the loggia, framed with blocky columns and rare on Portland buildings, has a tropical feel (and on a more practical note, it offers outdoor dining sheltered from both the sun and rain). The bright pink exterior lets you know right away that nothing is taken too seriously, and inside the sun-drenched colors of sky, beach, and ocean combine with the sounds of merengue to take you away, if only for an hour or two, to a magical island where life is always good.