The Americas

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Ah, the outrage generated by pictures of Jay-Z puffing a puro in Old Havana while Beyonce snaps pictures of the crumbly walls. The first picture, above, from Lisa Shires’ photoessay from those same streets seems to me worth far more contemplation.

In that moment Shires caught on camera, a young boy is trying to buy vegetables off a street vendor, only to be told that he doesn’t have enough money. All Cubans, of course, have rations that are meant to keep them from starving (plus: elderly men are given an added cigar ration). But getting anything more than rice and beans is difficult; the government stores have a late-Soviet barren quality to them. So food, the kind that gives people a bit of protein or real nutrients, is relegated to the streets and to the black market.

There are those who would romanticize Cuba’s moves toward food sustainability, particularly its well-publicized foray into urban organopónicos, those organic victory gardens that were supposed to solve the simmering food crisis. This recent piece from the lovable scamps at the socialist Monthly Review is well-intended but written with the enthusiasm of someone who has never had to actually rely on Cuba’s “food revolution” for dinner. It may be, as the article says, that “urban agriculture within and around Havana accounts for 60–90 percent of the produce consumed in the city.” But Shires went trawling through the rooftops and schools of all of Habana Vieja and found only one withered organopónico, at a school. And regardless of how much is grown in the semi-rural outskirts, very few people without access to U.S. dollars can afford them.

[If you have the time, read this brave op-ed in the NY Times about how blacks are increasingly excluded from this group of US currency-holders. The author of the piece lost his job at a publishing house in Cuba after it was published, a firing he blames on the blunt headline that editors at the Times put on the story.]

The basic movement in Cuba’s economy is this: the island is in the multi-year process of laying off up to a million public employees, because the government knows it can no longer afford to employ 80% of the total workforce, as it has in years past. The hope is that many of those laid-off workers will become dirt farmers and animal husbanders—goats, anyone?—and thereby add to the limited food supply. It would be an intricate maneuver for even the most efficient country to pull off. Cuba’s sclerotic and sometimes delusional administration hardly seems up to the task.

Until they get it right, the black market will continue to dominate, and regular Cubans won’t be able to eat well. And that, not rap-agent-moguls strolling Habana Vieja in fedoras, is actually worthy of outrage. —Nathan Thornburgh

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Lisa Shires is a Baltimore-based photographer. Check out her work here, or follow her on Twitter

Roasted Richardson’s Pork Belly at East Side Show Room, Austin, TX. Chef: Paul Hargrove

SXSW IS LIKE THE SUN: huge and gaseous and best viewed indirectly. Don’t stare straight at the Austin Convention Center, where Oreos Brand Ambassadors are incinerating what was left of the tech-rawk-film convention’s indie credibility. Don’t burn your retinas on the blinding orb of anti-awesome that is the Fleishman Hillard corporate communications “lounge” at the Four Seasons Hotel.

Instead, enjoy the shady corners of the festival: the side conversations at Clive Bar on Davis, the serendipitous reunions on South Congress, or the chance to bump into Bassem Youssef and DJ Spooky in the same random hallway. It’s cheap and easy to criticize what a brand bazaar the festival has become, but there’s no need to make yourself a victim. Just walk away from all the parts you don’t like.

The hunt for food should be guided by the same principles. Don’t wait in line for that free taco. Avoid any meal that has a launch partner. Turn your back to the carnival of handouts and cross under the freeway to East Austin and see what chef Paul Hargrove is doing on East 6th Street.

Roads & Kingdoms has a history with Hargrove. Those readers who were with us when we started—at this selfsame festival in Austin last year—will remember the transnational powerhouse he put on at our launch party. He took our three early obsessions—Spain, Southeast Asia, and Peru—and made a menu out of it. That meant, in part: pimientos del piquillo con bacalao, open-faced bánh mì and ceviche with Gulf snapper and grapefruit.

Relationships like this can get messy. A man who cooks like that is someone you just want to be around. So this year I found myself, along with my brother, sitting at a table in Hargrove’s Travis Heights home, while Hargrove’s wife—it was her birthday—poured deep drams of George Dickel laced with ginger beer, simple syrup and lime. We drank until we began falling out of our chairs, and then we walked home.

SxSW ended on Saturday with a double pop explosion: Prince brought to you by Samsung, Justin Timberlake brought to you by the new MySpace. My own finale came on the way to the airport, when I made a second stop by the East Side Show Room to catch Hargrove putting together this singular dish, Roasted Richardson’s Pork Belly.

Richardson Farms is in Rockdale, Texas, an old Alcoa town (and home to Pee Wee Crayton) some 50 miles from Austin. The dish is named after the pork belly they deliver. But it’s really Hargrove’s dish, a polyglot bowl the size of a hubcap with European inspiration and ratios like an inverted ramen: a little bit of broth, a ton of tender pork belly.

Paul Hargrove, at East Side Show Room

It’s worth interjecting here that Hargrove does not go for the word ‘fusion’. He’s not alone in this. The savant of Central Restaurante in Lima, Virgilio Martinez, got somewhat tongue-tied in our conversation with him when he tried to find a polite way to disavow the term.

Hargrove’s problem with the word is that it’s just imprecise. “Fusion” is not a style, he says. “Just like farm-to-table: That’s not a style of cooking, [that’s] a supply chain.” Richardson’s pork belly came from a local farm to Hargrove’s table, but that doesn’t tell you much about what he’s going to do with it.

For Hargrove, French cooking is a style, and it is has been his style ever since he cooked at Daniel in NYC. For this dish, that means curing the pork in brown sugar and salt and spices for six hours. Then he poaches it in white wine, water and a mirepoix for another four hours at 325°. The salt turns the liquid into a broth. Strain and add grace notes of parmesan and mustard.

That’s the French twist. But on top of the poitrine de porc comes a wholly Italian innovation, the uova da raviolo. Note the singular: This one raviolo is the size of a fist. There is herbed ricotta and a single egg yolk inside, and the whole thing gets cooked for just an instant—merely threatening the thin raviolo with boiling water is almost enough to get it there—so that the yolk remains runny and as golden as the sun.

All of this is topped with a Spanish touch. On a trip to northern Spain, Hargrove didn’t just remember the Basque pintxos, but also the way that every restaurant and café in San Sebastian seemed to serve diners a fistful of thin-cut fries. So Hargrove’s pork belly is ringed with black-eyed peas and mushrooms and then crowned with a golden haystack of fries.

Hargrove’s best explanation for how he came up with the dish is: “I cook what I like to eat.” Good words to live by, and the reason his dish makes for a fine anniversary meal. If there’s one thing we can say about the first year of Roads & Kingdoms, it’s that we cooked what we liked to eat. Stories about legendary chili sauces, mapped-out dispatches of a heavily-armed dash for Mogadishu ice cream or a minibus journey through the heart of Armenia: this is the menu we’ve chosen.

The East Side Show Room is, rather self-consciously, a speakeasy. The bar is the centerpiece, all class and brass, with devil-red accent lighting. But an honest dish like this, where egg yolk spills over pork belly into a darkening broth, isn’t meant for pairing with cucumber martinis. Give it a local beer—maybe a Pearl Snap pils—and begin. The carnival barkers and bacchanalians to the west will have to wait.

A pastes-lines street. All photos: Adriana Barboza

Every Mexican is a foodie, by estadounidense standards, at least. Barring French, fusion, or the latest foreign cuisine (Arab restaurants seem to be making popular headway), the best food in the country is available to all income levels, served on the street. Mexicans love to talk about food, recommending this or that tianguis, swearing allegiance to regional dishes that have become national emblems: Oaxacan mole or Yucatecan cochinita pibil.

The is the story of the emblem-dish of the small desert-and-forest state of Hidalgo, which lies about an hour and a half outside Mexico City, at an even higher altitude than the capital (Real del Monte lies 10,000 feet above sea level and is the highest town in the country). Its tidy, palm-studded capital, Pachuca, anchors a scattering of smaller municipios making up the rest of the state. There were gold and silver mines here from almost the day the first Spaniards arrived—Real del Monte’s true name is Mineral del Monte—and they operated, with only brief interruptions at hundred-year intervals for wars of Independence and Revolution, until the last one closed in 2004.

Those mines are what first brought the Cornish to Hidalgo. In 1825 an expedition of sixty men left from Falmouth, Cornwall, in the far southwestern tip of England, for Mexico, with 1500 tons of mining equipment, set on reviving the abandoned mines around of Pachuca. Half of them died of yellow fever along the way, but at the end of a fourteen-month journey, they arrived at Real del Monte. They stayed there for most of a century, until the decade of instability around the Mexican Revolution drove their descendants away.

As they fled, however, they left a fair amount of their culture behind. Notice the tidiness of Pachuca, and the peculiar attention to residential gardening. Yes, there are trees and shrubbery throughout all parts of Mexico, often guarded against dog urine with a barrier of plastic water bottles (the animals shy from their reflection). But in Pachuca there are roses. Little lawns. Parts of the city look not at all unlike areas of West Los Angeles.

Notice the red pitched roofs, another Cornish import, as you make the windy twenty-minute journey uphill from the semi-desert of Pachuca to the high forest of Real del Monte.

When the tin mines of Cornwall began to peter out at the end of the 18th century, men skilled in the difficult practice of hard rock mining fled in droves, looking for work. An estimated quarter-million Cornish immigrated throughout the British Commonwealth, as well as to Mexico and Brazil, in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was these far-flung brothers and fathers of Cornwall who first brought the idea of remittance pay, now a staple of Mexican economy that arrives from Mexican laborers in the U.S. The Cornish sent money home, but they dug into Mexico, intermarried, established their Methodist religion in a country that up to then had been strictly Catholic, and were buried in the Panteón de los Ingléses, feet pointed east—facing home.

The Cornish will tell you they introduced Mexicans—and many other countries—to wrestling, rugby, tennis, chess, and even the only sport that really matters in Mexico now: soccer. Atletico de Pachuca was Mexico’s first fútbol club, founded in 1902. I had to learn that part from the Internet, though, because I don’t really care about sports. What fascinates me most about Hidalgo and its immigrant past is something you find everywhere on the streets of Pachuca and Real del Monte: the Cornish pasty. Two hours from where 24 million Mexicans make and eat more tacos than anywhere else on the planet, you can scarcely find a taco. But there can be up to five pastes spots on a single block. It’s pastes, pastes, pastes (that’s the Mexican spelling) everywhere you look.

First order of business: a Cornish pasty is not just a cold-weather empanada. Yes, it’s a stuffed pastry like empanadas are, but pastes have their own crimping and filling conventions, and their own type of dough. They’re different enough that lots of pastes shops have both pastes and empanadas listed on the menu.

Pasty fillings divide into savory and sweet: fibrous, stewy tinga de pollo and beans-and-chorizo seem to be the most popular meal selections, with hearty potato and onion a close runner-up, while dessert or breakfast sweet pastes come with pineapple, apple, creamy nuez (a sweet nut butter) or arroz con crema. People in Real del Monte and Pachuca, where the highway is lined with mom-and-pop pastes shops as well as corporatized fast-food-style chains like Pastes Kiko’s, seem like they could survive on these baked goods alone.

It’s really not so strange. Foreigners think of Mexico as a hot country, but just as often the mountains are cool, and at the high altitude, summer tropical storms aren’t sultry. They’re as cold as a Cornwall early spring. The day my girlfriend and I arrived, we were madly underdressed and had to impulse-buy flap caps and, in a great humiliation to us capitalinos, tourist-corny jergas (the rough, hooded sweatshirts your cousin might have come back from Tijuana in). At sundown, as we returned to the centro, it started to rain. I had eaten my first Cornish pasty when I was an expat teenager in Buckinghamshire twenty-five years ago, but I still knew exactly what it was for. No matter that the filling is Mexican chicken in red sauce; the feeling of refuge, of a warm pastry to fend off a chilling rain, that is as English as, well… you know the rest.

Grant Cogswell is the author of The Dream of the Cold War: Poems 1998-2008 (Publication Studio), the subject of director Stephen Gyllenhaal’s most recent film Grassroots, and founder and proprietor of Under the Volcano Books in Mexico City, where he lives.

Almaz Dama, kitchen queen of Virginia’s little Ethiopia

Tucked in the shadows of the Pentagon, somewhere between Arlington and Falls Church on Columbia Pike, lies a little piece of Ethiopia. You might call it the Dama complex: the Dama Pastry & Cafe includes a coffee shop where women pull thick shots of espresso for a fleet of African cab drivers; a bakery where the soup comes with a side of politics and plenty of opinion; and a deeply-loved restaurant, where spicy beef tartar and slow-simmered vegetables help bridge the distance between two countries for a dining room full of immigrants.

Ethiopian immigrants first settled in Northern Virginia after the revolution in 1974, a coup that overthrew the monarchy and led to the establishment of the Derg, leading to years of bloody civil war. Including the descendants of Ethiopian-born migrants, there are some 460,000 ethnic Ethiopians living in the United States, and about 350,000 of those reside in Washington, D.C. and northern Virginia. Travel guides and food TV shows have nodded at this community, but they’ve mostly stuck to the obvious bistro-like, tablecloth, sit-down joints that serve the most emblematic exports of Ethiopian food, like kitfu and injera. For the real, informal heart of Ethiopian culture, skip those and follow the cabs.

Split Peas and Refugees
The cabs will lead you to the parking lot of Dama Pastry & Restaurant where taxis of all sizes and colors, from yellow and black sedans to blue mini vans, squeeze in alongside each other. Find a spot if you can, then squeeze through the small crowd that has gathered outside the doors, conversing over a post-meal smoke or debating last night’s soccer match.

Get inside and start things off with the kitfo—minced beef tartar with spiced butter, served with homemade cheese called ayib—along with awaze tibs, a dish of cubed beef laced with onions and peppers and lashed with a slew of spices and awaze, a hot chili paste. Ethiopians cherish their raw beef dishes, usually minced or in thick slabs with generous layers of fat intact. To balance out the meat, add on the vegetarian combo, which includes red lentil puree, yellow split peas, ground roasted split peas and collard greens.

A little bit of everything from Dama Pastry & Restaurant

The platter arrives. The colors astound. Ruby red beef from the fiery awaze, shades of sunset orange, cornfield yellow from the lentils and peas, and sprinkles of pearl white from the ayib. Sharing, an important part of Ethiopian culture, is built in to the dish. The food is all laid out on a bed of injera—a spongy traditional bread— so that family and friends alike can dig in with their hands. It’s more akin to an artist’s pallet than a plate of food. The kitfo is a fine mix of meat and spices, and the homemade ayib adds a rich, creamy texture and just the right amount of salt. This is the rhythm of the restaurant: just as you’re mopping up the last lentils, more patrons walk in, mostly in groups, and order their own platters of color on gigantic spreads of injera.

Dama was no instant success. Owner and pastry chef Almaz Dama, along with her sister Yeshi, were students at Howard University when the revolution in Ethiopia broke out in 1974. Some family members safely immigrated to the U.S. as refugees, but many, including brothers and cousins, lost their lives during the uprising and ensuing civil war.

“Life was not easy,” says Almaz. “We studied during the day and worked odd jobs at night – as maids, bussers, waiters, and bartenders. Everything was different, and we had to adjust to survive.”

For those that came to the U.S. as refugees after the start of the revolution, the road to settlement was smoother, as permanent resident status was easier to obtain. On the contrary, for international students like Almaz and Yeshi, who were residing in the U.S. with student visas before the revolution, jobs and permanent status were hard to come by. After years of saving, the siblings first opened a restaurant in 1983, a small cafe inside the Veteran’s building in D.C., but the establishment struggled financially and closed four years later. After that, everyone went their own ways, until Almaz’s younger sister Kelem opened Dama Pastry & Restaurant in 2000 at its current location on Columbia Drive.

The late Dama Nademo, the family patriarch and Almaz’s father, was a respected businessman and humanitarian in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia. Among other things, he was revered for leading many Gurage tribe members out to the cities and providing them with good-paying jobs and educational opportunities. “When my father passed away, my uncle opened a restaurant in Ethiopia by the name of Dama, in honor of my father,” says Almaz. “That restaurant was a success. So when we opened our own Dama here in Virginia, the Ethiopian immigrants were already familiar with the name and became regulars.”

So it’s not just about food. It’s about history, culture, survival, revival. For a sense of the political salon that is Dama, head just next door to Dama Bakery for a cappuccino.

Cabbies fuel up on soup and politics

Fried Fish and Buttered Coffee
A 20-inch television hangs on the back wall of the Dama Bakery, flashing images of billowing smoke columns, mountains of crumpled concrete in Gaza. You don’t need to understand Ethiopian to figure out what the cafe patrons are talking about: Heads swivel back and forth as animated voices fight to be heard. Bread and spoons in hand, the conversation this early afternoon is all Gaza.

No written menu and no tablecloth. That’s how it’s been for the past decade at Dama Bakery, the lesser-known (and less traditional) extension of the Dama Pastry & Restaurant. No matter: as so as you choose a table and take your coat off, the friendly Almaz Dama will greet you with her flashing smile. Fresh fish is today’s menu: pan-fried salmon or tilapia, or perhaps Alamaz’s famous fish cutlet. A moment of indecision and then she offers: “The fish cutlet is good, you’ll like it.” The lady has spoken. Cutlet it is.

First comes the vegetable soup, simple yet soothing in the way that onions, carrots and garlic that have been simmering for hours can be. There’s a strong kick from the fresh black pepper, and eaten together with wholesome flat bread, the soup is an excellent meal in itself.

Aymala’s famous fish cutlet

Then comes the cutlet. Fresh tilapia fillet, crusted with a generous layer of bread crumbs, fried to a crispy, golden hue—perfection. No tartar sauce, Tabasco or Sriracha needed. Just a dash of lemon across the still-steaming fillet, and it’s all light, moist, and fresh. The sides of steamed carrots and string beans, steamed yellow rice, and lightly seasoned chopped collard greens surround the fillet in generous portions. Pretty incredible for working man’s fare, a cabbie’s lunch.

A group of four or five cab drivers enter jovially, exchanging hugs and kisses with Almaz and the waitstaff. They pull together a couple round tables in the corner of the dining room, chatting lively—again, about the Gaza shelling—as they await their food. Even for the solo eaters, it feels like a holiday family gathering.

“The cab drivers want to eat healthier, lighter meals. So they often come here, enjoy the food, and have a good time, relaxing before heading back out again,” says Almaz.

“Driving and sitting all day makes it hard to digest heavier food,” says Yiheyis, a cab driver who immigrated here in 2004. His plate is full of flatbread and stir-fried tofu. “Some cabbie friends do go next door when they want Ethiopian food, but some of us prefer the lighter dishes here.”

After lunch, Yiheyis and his friend Teshome head over next door to Dama Café for coffee. Lattes are their drink of choice, but you might find, like I did, that the double-shot espresso is a more a perfect match with Almaz’s delicate Italian rum cake. “Macchiatos are most popular in coffee shops in Ethiopia,” says Teshome, a cabbie who immigrated to the U.S. in 2001. “But in our homes, we drink black coffee, three times a day, straight out of a jebena.” Italian specialties like macchiatos and cakes were embedded in Ethiopian cuisine since Italy’s occupation of the country in the 1930s, but the Ethiopians have made coffee and cake into their own ritual. It is now an integral part of their daily routine.

A caffeine kick before the long shift ahead

Dama’s cakes are sprinkled with magic pixie dust—feathery bites of flour and sugar, knock-out punches of vanilla and rum. Baking runs in the family, as Almaz’s father, Dama Nademo, used to bake for the Ethiopian Air Force. Almaz grew up smelling fresh cakes and pastries in the family-run bakery, as she spent countless hours there as a child. Her pastry passion continued here, as she studied under Chef Mesnier Ronald, a White House executive pastry chef, while at L’Academie de Cuisine.

“Coffee plays a huge role in our culture,” says Teshome. “Ethiopia has some of the best beans in the world, and everything we drink there is fresh and organic. During the holidays, or when we entertain guests, we prepare a special black coffee with organic butter.”

[Note: do not try this at home! Teshome warns that regular American supermarket butter would just ruin the coffee]

Asked why he returns to Dama, Yiheyis puts it simply: “We feel at home.” Just as Dama Nademo had provided refuge and hope in Debre Zeit all those years ago, Almaz and her siblings are doing just that, right here in the heart of Northern Virginia.

Sung Chang is a DC-based lawyer and sometimes ruthless eater of offal. He blogs at I Am Not a Lawyer.