November 16–23, 2000

cover story

¡Gringo!

Anglos go Cuba Libre.

by a.d. amorosi

Americanos have oozed into Cuban cuisine and its accompanying visual style like sugar into cafe con leche. While Walnut Street awaits the coming of Stephen Starr and Douglas Rodriguez’s Alma de Cuba in February 2001, Old City’s Nuevo Latino entry — Cuba Libre at 10 S. 2nd St. — is nearly ready to rumba.

Barry Gutin and Larry Cohen of Egypt and Shampoo have spent nearly $1 million making Cuba Libre both theatrically engaging and historically accurate, with the help of interior designers Anthony Ciocca, Jesse Gardner, architects David Polatnick and Cuban-born Mario Zacharjasc and Baltimore’s cinematic design firm Dynamic Imagineering, the parties responsible for aging Old City for Jonathan Demme’s Beloved. In the de-construction zone, a cherry picker flicks bits of the building’s former occupant, the open-air restaurant Prego. Step into what-will-be Cuba Libre’s bar entrance and through the two lower-level dining rooms, and you’re in a maze of tannish stucco walls, arching entryways, muted color tiles and a mix of new and antique materials, including grand salvaged wooden doors, antique bars, thatched roofs and 200-year-old stained glass. Move up one of two wrought, iron railed banisters and you get a bird’s-eye view of the interior courtyard — differing-sized balconies, window ledges pastel-painted in mints, golds, pink and orange and aged with greenery and moss to look distressed, not decrepit.

"We’ve been debating what to do," says Gutin on the clean-dirty design. "Throughout Cuba’s history walls have been dilapidated and dirty with age and mildew. We didn’t want that. But now, you go to Havana and it’s so clean. It’s scrubbed of character."

Beyond its movie-set feel, what gives Cuba Libre its truest tone is actual Cubanitis. The second floor La Galleria terrace/dining room will double as an art spot that’ll host Cuban arts and artists curated by Pablo Labaniño. "It’s people like that — Cubans living here for decades, people just arrived from Cuba — that have given Cuba Libre its accuracy. That’s how I’ve judged our authenticity," Gutin says. "We don’t think anyone in the country can match the theater of what we’ve done."

Along with a wide selection of rums and mojitas and programmable musics of cosmopolitan Cuba, Gutin points at a menu of entrees ranging from $16 to $22 developed by Pasion owner/chef Guillermo Pernot, who’s advising Cuba Libre chef Josh Friedberg on how to seriously approach the food and its culture. Cuba Libre’s Dec. 12 opening (with a Dec. 1 First Friday peek) should be as tasty as it is aesthetically tantalizing.