Zaza Cuban Comfort Food
There's no place like home!
When I started this journey, I’m not sure how frequently I expected to be able to check out new places, but given the recent mix of travel, guests-in-town, and general life obstacles, I’ve definitely not been keeping pace. Someone asked me why I don’t just do some entries from outside Tampa, but in my experience it is basically a non-starter: like you can’t get a good pit-beef sandwich outside of Baltimore, or you can’t get a good spiedie outside of Binghamton, you can’t get a good cuban outside of the Tampa Bay area. However I happened to find myself over in Orlando for the day and I remembered I had wanted to check out a possible cuban sandwich exception at the city-wide chain “Zaza’s Cuban Comfort Food”.
When you first walk into a Zaza’s, your hit with a few different options, including breakfast, some more traditional cuban fare, some empanada options, and of course some cuban sandwich options. I actually thought a number of the items looked pretty good, but I was here with a purpose, so I stuck to a cuban sandwich, while Hambre grabbed some empanadas and black bean soup. The seating at this particular location was very diner-esque, so after ordering at the front we grabbed a booth and waited for our food.
I don’t want to be a downer, but of course what happened was exactly as I expected. What I got was a very nice cuban-style sandwich pressed on quality bread, but as per usual outside of the golden circle, completely devoid of salami. In there defense, the menu does refer to it as a “Cubano” rather than a cuban sandwich, and I would say that seems accurate to me. And I get it, Cubans traditionally don’t eat salami, and outside of Tampa Bay the most likely place to even have a cuban sandwich is going to be a cuban restaurant… after all you also need Cuban bread and that isn’t particularly easy to find the farther north you travel. But it is this mix of cultures that were brought together a hundred years ago that created uniquely special places like Ybor City, just as the mix of flavor powers our beloved sandwich; and without it, it is palpable that something is missing.
So with the sandwich being what the sandwich was, I do want to give a shout-out to the other items we tried… the empanadas were both good (we tried one beef and one chicken) and the black bean soup was also pretty tasty (although ours was served without accompanying rice that the menu indicated we should have received). At the end of the day though, we felt the meal (and as I type this, also the review) fell a little flat, but I would certainly be willing to try them again and I think the breakfast menu definitely deserves further exploration the next time I am in Orlando.
And yeah, for some reason I totally forgot to take any pictures of the food, so here is another nature picture, this being the Saint John’s River, which was just a light-weight trail ride down the way from our lake picture above.
