Kitchen Secrets with Our Cuban Chef – The Cuban Sandwich Argument: Tampa versus Miami

Order a Cuban sandwich in Tampa and there is salami in it. Order the same sandwich in Miami and there is not. That is the whole argument. Two cities, four hours apart on the same highway, the same island behind both of them, and one thin slice of cured pork that nobody will let go of.

Everything else matches. Cuban bread, roast pork, sweet ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, yellow mustard, pressed on a hot plancha until the crust cracks under the knife. No lettuce. No tomato. Both cities agree on all of it, which is exactly why the disagreement has lasted: there is only one thing left to argue about.

We are in Tampa, so the question comes across our counter most weeks. Here is the even-handed version, including the parts where the history is thinner than either side likes to admit.

Two cigar towns and a lunch

The sandwich did not begin as a rivalry. It began as something a working person could carry.

Cuban cigar makers moved to Key West in numbers after the fighting on the island started in 1868, and the trade grew there for nearly two decades. In 1885 Vicente Martinez Ybor bought scrubland northeast of Tampa, and the first cigar factories opened on it the year after. Workers followed, from Key West and straight from Havana, and Ybor City went up around the factory floors.

The neighbourhood filled with Cubans, Spaniards from Galicia and Asturias, and Italians, most of them Sicilian. They lived on the same blocks, bought from the same groceries and ate at the same counters between shifts. A sandwich of ham, roast pork and cheese pressed flat on Cuban bread was cheap, easy to carry and fine at room temperature. In Cuba the same idea goes by mixto.

Who served the first one, and where, is not settled. The paper trail is thin. Old menus and newspaper advertisements from Key West, Tampa and Havana all turn up early mentions, and the researchers who have gone through them still disagree about which reference counts. Anyone who tells you the question is closed is telling you about their city, not about the evidence.

The salami, and where it came from

What Tampa added is not in doubt, even if the date is. A slice or two of Genoa salami goes in with the ham, under the pork and the cheese, and the sandwich comes off the press with a faint cured edge running through it. It is not a loud addition. You notice it most when it is missing.

The usual explanation is Ybor City’s Italian families, and it holds up: they were there from the start, they ran groceries, and salami was on the shelf. The odd part is that the slice is Genoa style while most of Ybor’s Italians came from Sicily. Nobody wrote down why. The likeliest answer is the dullest one, which is that Genoa salami was what the local suppliers sold.

Whether the salami was there from the beginning or arrived a generation later, no one can prove. What is clear is that it has been standard in Tampa long enough that a sandwich without it reads to a Tampa native as somebody else’s sandwich. That is how food traditions work. They get fixed in place by repetition, not by documents.

Both sides of the argument sit on our menu. There is the Cuban sandwich, and there is a salami, ham and cheese for anyone who wants the cured slice out in front. Order the one you grew up with. Both are honest. They are just from different halves of the state.

What Miami keeps off it

Miami’s Cuban sandwich came through a different door and a later one. The city’s Cuban population grew after 1959, through the exile waves, Little Havana and the ventanitas that still sell coffee to the pavement. The people who arrived had eaten the sandwich in Havana, where salami was not part of it. Miami is not leaving something out. Miami never had it in.

The bread differs too, quietly. Tampa loaves are traditionally baked with a palmetto frond laid down the top, which leaves a seam in the crust as the loaf rises around it, and La Segunda Central Bakery in Ybor City has been baking that way since 1915. Miami loaves usually skip the leaf. Both carry a little lard in the dough, which is why Cuban bread goes thin and shatters under a press instead of turning to leather like a baguette.

The 2012 resolution

In April 2012 the Tampa City Council passed a resolution making the historic Tampa Cuban sandwich the signature sandwich of the city. The text set the thing out layer by layer, salami included. It passed unanimously and it made the papers in both cities, which was never an accident.

It is worth being clear about what that document is. A council resolution is a statement of position. It creates no rule, binds no kitchen and settles no history. What it did was give Tampa something to point at, and the city has pointed at it ever since, through festivals in Ybor City and a good deal of cheerful noise aimed south.

Miami, for its part, conceded nothing and had no reason to. The resolution was a claim about Tampa’s own past, not a ruling about anybody else’s. Read that way it is fair enough. The salami version really is Tampa’s, it really did come out of that neighbourhood, and it deserves a name of its own rather than being treated as a mistake.

Chef’s notes

• The press has to be hot before the sandwich goes on. A cold plate squashes the loaf without crisping it, and you end up with dense bread and cheese that never melted. Give it three to four minutes with real weight on top and let the crust do the work.
• Wrong bread ruins it faster than wrong meat. A sub roll or a baguette fights back under the press and turns chewy. Cuban bread is built for this: thin crust, soft crumb, a little lard in the dough.
• Deli pork is the most common shortcut and the most obvious one. The pork should be roasted with garlic, cumin and sour orange, then sliced and warmed through. Cold slices out of a packet taste flat next to the ham.
• Go easy on the mustard and drain the pickles. Too much liquid soaks the crumb from the inside, so the middle turns soft while the outside crisps. A thin line of yellow mustard is enough.

What goes beside it

A Cuban sandwich does not need much next to it. Plantains, fries or a small salad, and something cold. The coffee comes after rather than alongside: a short, strong Cuban espresso once the plate is clear, which is the local habit and worth keeping.

If you want the same fillings without the crackle, the medianoche is the other half of the family: identical inside, but pressed on soft, faintly sweet egg bread. It is gentler, it suits a late hour, and nobody in either city argues about it. That alone tells you the fight was always about the bread and the salami, not about the pork.

Come and pick a side

Arguments about food are usually arguments about where people come from, and this one is no different. Tampa’s sandwich carries a cigar-town neighbourhood in it, Miami’s carries a later crossing, and both are worth eating in the same week. Ours is pressed to order, and the full list, sandwiches and sides included, sits on our menu.