The bar eventually closed. The 13 stained glass lamps have already been lowered from the ceiling. They have piled up the 26 red-backed chairs and the 14 wooden tables. They have packed metal cutlery, white porcelain plates, and black bean canteens in cardboard boxes. From the office, they have taken down the photo of Juan Carlos Formell, a gesture that would put an end to the mourning for the death of the bassist, who recently collapsed on the stage of the Lehman Center during a concert by the orchestra Los Van Van; they have unscrewed the pictures from the wall, and a sign that reads: E. Houston St, 1st Ave; they have dismantled the kitchen, packed up the leftover food and accounted for all the drink that was not drunk on the last night, or the night before, or the rest in the life of Mi Salsa Kitchen: two bottles of Patrón Añejo, one of Don Julio 1942, three of Cazadores Blancos, several boxes of Bacardi, two of extra dry Vermouth, six from Christian Brothers and the same amount of house vodka.
Everything will be moved to a storage room in the Bronx, those cemeteries of neoliberalism destined for the accumulation of objects that once served someone until they were no longer useful, and that remain with the promise of being used again. A lot of work has been done today, friends have come to help. Spirits are down. A Puerto Rican salsa is playing in the background, let's say Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz. Gustavo Martínez, the Venezuelan waiter who until yesterday opened the place in his shifts from eleven in the morning to six in the afternoon, enters in a hurry to get the last tip of his last working day. A choked cry comes suddenly: "It pains me to see this," he says, and wipes his black-paste glasses. "Here I wasn't working in a restaurant, I was working with the family."
He then walks out the front door and gets lost in the crowds of lower Manhattan. It's Monday, November 27. New Yorkers are bouncing back from Thanksgiving weekend. On the sidewalk in front of you, you can see young women with the Palestinian flag, someone walking a dog that is not theirs, and fluorescent signs advertising 99-cent pizzas that never cost 99 cents but more. The next day, Maritza Rodriguez and Ernesto Lago, the owners of Mi Salsa Kitchen, the most popular Cuban bar/restaurant in New York in the last two years, will hand over the keys to the place located right on the corner of Allen and Houston streets. The place, which is dying when it is most alive, was not profitable. It is said that it will be turned into a Chinese restaurant, one more on the list of 3,175 Chinese restaurants in New York. There have been reports that a burger joint will open, one more on the list of the city's 17,253 burger joints. No one knows for sure what's going to happen.
Ernesto Lago and Maritza Rodríguez, the owners of 'Mi Salsa Kitchen'. Juan Caballero
***
The day before, Maritza arrives around five o'clock in the afternoon, a Sunday afternoon that is more like a night at the beginning of the New York winter. The clothes he wears show no sign of winter. She wears a long pink floral dress and comfy sneakers and pink earrings. While Ana wraps the cutlery and Camila receives some orders, Maritza sits down to eat an order of tacos. Ana and Camila are two very young waitresses who arrived from Cuba a little over a year ago and work at the bar. The first is an art curator, the second an artist. They became involved in the political struggle against the Havana regime and were later banished. Maritza says it's the kind of people they employ: friends, referrals, or dissidents.
"They're not the best performers, but I don't care," he says as he devours the second of the tacos.
From the front door someone greets Maritza by raising his hand. Maritza returns the greeting in the same way. Maritza is 51 years old, she fell in love with Ernesto 15 years ago. Previously, he worked at Amor Cubano, a restaurant located in the heart of Harlem. She's flirtatious. He smiles frequently and believes that every bar owner has to be empathetic and make the customer loyal. Other times, not a few, he has had to show character when someone spends time at the bar without consuming. "There are people who come and want to stop and listen to free music," he says. "I've told them that this is not a park, this has to be paid for." It's what Maritza would consider a bad customer. On the contrary, a good one is one that not only consumes, but also knows how to enjoy the place.
For now, the music, a track from the Charanga Habanera, remains low. The bar is not crowded, but there is no shortage of customers at the tables. Clients of all kinds: mostly Cubans, but also other Latinos, gringos and tourists passing through. Everything indicates that it is going to be crowded. Off to one side is a lady in her 70s with her dog in a small car. The lady professes a deep contempt for other people. "I'm not interested in people," he said. He has a 36-year-old parrot. The lady, with bushy eyebrows and very long acrylic nails, doesn't talk to just anyone. If he or she takes the slightest bit of a liking to you, he or she might recommend vitamin D3 for skincare, or rattle off the list of the best plastic surgeons in town. The lady is a regular at the bar. At the moment, a gentleman enters, assiduous and Cuban like her. The lady looks at him and arches an eyebrow.
"It's because of people like that that the bar is closing. They don't spend money."
The lady arrived from Cuba in the 1960s. He has no family here. You don't need it either. He lives a few blocks from the bar. Every once in a while she goes on a trip with her dog. Some of those trips are to Miami, where he has a house that he doesn't plan to live in as long as he has the strength to live in New York.
"Miami makes you feel old. In New York, look at how I support myself."
Carmelo, the Mexican kitchen assistant in his 60s, goes up and down a staircase from the basement to the bar constantly, replenishing everything that time and people devour. Ernesto, 47, remains in the kitchen. I didn't want to come today, they tell me, but how could I not. It's the last night. A bell rings and Ana understands that a customer's order is ready. Everyone knows it will be the last picadillo a la habanera, the last beef and chipotle tacos, the last pork dough, the last black beans and the last stuffed tostones. The employees know it and the customers know it, and more and more of them are arriving, as if it were not a Sunday of rumba but of mass.
It's about seven o'clock at night. A customer in his fifties approaches the bar and doesn't speak, but with a gesture announces that he is going to eat. Maritza, who has already finished her cleats and now attends to those who arrive, grabs the gesture and interprets it, with the complicity of two players on a baseball field. "Congrí and masa?" he asks the customer. The customer nods.
Pork dough is probably the most successful dish in the place. So says Alfredo Junco, a chef since his beginnings. Junco, who more than once left the kitchen to jump on the dance floor, believes that the secret of the food at Mi Salsa Kitchen was always in the textures and flavors, and in the freedom that Ernesto gave him to create. "It's not about cooking and that's it, it's about researching and finding people's tastes."
Ernesto decided to open the bar in February 2020, when New York became the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, and at the same time more than 80,000 restaurants closed their doors and more than 200,000 people lost their jobs. "It was a good deal," Maritza says. "A time when they gave you low income. We were scared, but we were convinced it was going to be a success."
Singers Roger and Tito, during a performance at 'Mi Salsa Kitchen'. Juan Caballero
The experience, the music, and the food they could offer made them think they were going to succeed among the various Cuban restaurants in the city. Ernesto hired a chef to draw up the menu, but on the condition that the doughs be made strictly according to his mother and mother-in-law's recipe. The long menu is made up of traditional Cuban dishes such as fried yucca, croquettes, roast suckling pig or congrí, with prices of up to more than 25 dollars. Some find it too expensive. Others think it's fair. Maritza says they had no choice: "Cuban food in this city is terrible. We tried to make it like the food of the house. But the prices, unfortunately, have to be high. We're in New York."
The menu also has a list of dishes that have nothing to do with Cuban food and that show that, indeed, we are in New York: the chicken or carne asada tacos, the shrimp quesadillas, the chorizo burritos, the guacamole and the pico de gallo, and the delicious green and red sauces that Doris prepares. a Mexican woman who cooks like the gods the food that everyone is looking for in New York, fast and light, in a place where everyone pretends all the time that time is not enough for them.
"We changed the menu, because people began to come who were not only from the Cuban community, and we were interested in catching other communities," says Maritza, who now measures the exact amount of white rum, lemon juice, carbonated water, ice and peppermint. It's a mojito that he's been ordered.
The first idea of Ernesto, who had experience as manager of the Cuban restaurant Guantanamera, the tapas restaurant Lizarran, or the Cascabel taqueria, was not to open a restaurant, but a place of Cuban take-out food. New Yorkers love to eat out, and last year each household spent $4,004 on food out, just 37.6% of their income. But Ernesto's idea didn't work out and they made it a restaurant. When they realized that in that area of the Lower East Side people ate less and had more fun, they thought it was ideal for a bar, and they turned it into a bar. Since then, they have dispensed countless glasses of Old Cuban Mojito, margaritas, Tempranillo wine, shots of Cazamigos tequila, glasses of Tito vodka and, of course, the many Corona, Modelo, Peroni or Brooklyn IPA beers. New Yorkers love beer, drinking $830 per year, nearly double the national average.
Yuri Herrera, a Peruvian chef who works in the kitchen of a hotel two blocks from Mi Salsa Kitchen, came across the place looking for a beer to drink. "It was Sunday, and I was like, 'I'm going to buy beers to explore the neighborhood.'" He had arrived in the city only a short time ago, and went into the shop next door. He heard the music. It was salsa. "From that day on I became friends with Maritza and Ernesto. The question that comes up for all of us now that it's closing is: What are we going to do?"
Summer nights are the nights when the most beer is sold at Mi Salsa Kitchen. Those are the best nights. The time the bar has sold the least was when they counted just over $100, and the time they have sold the most they made just over $5,300. "That's good, but it's not great either," Maritza says. Ernesto thinks that if they had always sold that amount, they wouldn't be closing today.
The bar is a different bar every day of the week. On Mondays, the bar is not open. A dead place. On Tuesdays, it's a quiet place, with mostly gringo customers. Wednesdays, a tremendous day, for some the best of days, the day of the Cuban rumba, played by Cubans, and Colombians, and Dominicans, and Chileans, and which brings together the varied Latin diaspora of New York. The rumba, the rhythm of the black gods on earth, which the first Cubans brought to Central Park, and which has infiltrated the pagan life of New York as it did not in Miami, city of the Sun and of the long Cuban exile. Thursdays count as a bad day, with few customers swaying to the music of the Colombian cumbia group Los Mochuelos, or the Cuban Danny Rojo, or the downloads of Juan Carlos Formell and Danae Blanco.
"It was a lot of beautiful moments," says Blanco, who started singing at Mi Salsa Kitchen from the beginning. "There are some places where you can make Cuban music, but not purely Cuban music like in this one."
Some Cubans, especially Cubans over the age of 50 living in New York City, agree that Friday is the most special of days. Every Friday at nine o'clock in the evening, under the dim light of Mi Salsa Kitchen, the voice of Xiomara Laugart, one of the most important female voices in Cuba, explodes. Everyone wants to see Laugart. Everyone believes that, at certain times, being in New York is like being in Havana. Not infrequently someone was heard to say that being in Mi Salsa Kitchen was like being in Cuba. What reminds them of Havana is not exactly a physical resemblance, not its yellow walls, its blue-framed windows or its hanging taros, but a feeling, the other idea of a country, the common embrace of exile, another dimension of similarity. For Cubans, Fridays were the days to meet Laugart, and for Laugart Fridays were the days to meet Cubans in New York.
A group of musicians during a performance at 'Mi Salsa Kitchen'. Juan Caballero
"It was the best thing about every Friday, how people greeted you," says the singer. "We all had the need to feel at home. Singing at Mi Salsa Kitchen was like being in Havana, with my clave, my son at the piano, people dancing, chorus, as if we were in the center of Havana."
Saturdays are the day of the group Los tres del solar. After each performance, DJ Yongolailan takes over the set, with a mix of Van Van's most anthological songs, Bad Bunny's summer hits, Juan Luis Guerra's tastiest merengues, some last-shift Cuban reggaeton, and Héctor Lavoe's most emblematic tracks. Everyone agrees that Mi Salsa Kitchen has been, first and foremost, a space for music. Uruguayan Jorge Drexler passed by a night of rumba and grabbed the microphone and sang in chorus with the rumberos. Another memorable night sang Diego el Cigala. Once, singer-songwriter Descemer Bueno exploded the site of people chanting his hit Bailando. The rapper Telmary, the rapper El B, the salsa singer Alexander Abreu, and several of the members of Van Van or the group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas were there.
"Being in this corner is very important to me," Bárbaro Ramos, principal dancer of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, once said when he visited the place on his 13th trip to New York. "The atmosphere is that of Cuba, and the rumba, I love the rumba."
Sundays are the days of the Guataca Trio. But today is Sunday, November 26 and a poster announces that there will be no Cuban son, but that the last rumba will take place at Mi Salsa Kitchen. They have spread it on social networks and Whatsapp groups. The poster features a photo of rumba master Román Díaz, a percussion legend and former member of the Yoruba group Andabo. For days there has been talk that the restaurant is going to close. No one believes it. People wonder if it's true that it's going to close. It's true. People wonder if it's forever. Forever. Other times it was also thought that the bar was no longer working, such as when the Omicron virus once again barracked New Yorkers in their homes, or with the rise in rent prices, or because of the low influx of dancers during the winter. Then the place, without any explanation, was reborn. In recent months, in fact, the place has been a lively place, with loyal customers who reserve it for their nights out. Anyone might think that it is a successful place, that it is dying when it is most alive.
"As a bar it has been successful, but monetarily it has not been," says Ernesto, who in these two years has seen how several of the neighboring businesses have closed and reopened, converted from restaurant to churro shop, from nightclub to fast food place, from pizzeria to gallery. Ernesto could explain why a Cuban bar may not be successful in New York. I could mention the low sales, the few deliveries, the reviews they never had in the media, or the space of the place, which is too small.
Now that it's a little after eight o'clock at night, the bar, just over 750 square feet, is starting to fill with people, the latest visitors to Mi Salsa Kitchen. Juan Caballero, a Cuban photographer who has been documenting rumba for 20 years and who lives just a ten-minute walk away, has arrived. Juan never misses, especially on Wednesdays and Fridays. Other times, when he comes home from work on the train, sometimes he just comes in to say hello. "Places like this are unrepeatable," he says. He looks sad. "Here we have found company, someone to talk to, to hug."
Then the rumbero Rafael Monteagudo enters, in a hurry, who will sit in front of the fifth box when the show begins. "I never think it's the last rumba here," he says. "Life never tells you when it's the last time."
Singer Roger Consiglio, who remains very quiet until the rumba breaks out, is nostalgic. He says this is the only place he feels at home. "You come and you have a little piece of Cuba." The Chilean Maximo Valdés, who has come with long sleeves, is also subdued, and will accompany Roger in singing and claves: "This is a Cuban bar, but also Latin American," he says. "A community was formed and I'm going to miss it."
The bar is packed when the first drums, the bus and the cowbells sound. Everyone is silent in front of the altar of the rumberos. Outside, the rows of yellow cabs cursing Uber, the young women in rolled-up blouses in the five-degree cold, the rats strolling through Second Avenue Station, the lines for the ATM where everyone takes out the cash they never have, the flashy doormen of buildings, the most elegant doormen a city can boast, and those who come to Mi Salsa Kitchen, more and more.
Enter Pupy, who for a long time, with his extravagant looks of pointed-toe shoes, suit and hat, worked as a kind of tropical host. Pupy firmly believes that the best thing about Mi Salsa Kitchen was himself: "This place is special, but more special if it's me. No Pupy, no party." The doctor who has an Iranian wife arrives and doesn't miss the salsa days. DJ Gael Serafín, who has had unforgettable parties at the bar, and who has watery eyes, is also here: "Right now I'm realizing that we don't have another space for Cubans to come and be together," he says. There is also Susana Vallejo, a Venezuelan who arrived one night during the pandemic and never left: "It's a meeting place, and we're not going to have it anymore." Ricardo Arnéis arrives, a Peruvian who says he has never seen a place with such beautiful men and women. Art curator Tata Lopera, a neighbor of the bar, is seen sitting in a corner, who two years ago got out of the subway and told her husband: "They're building a new place called Mi Salsa Kitchen." Since then, she has not stopped visiting him. Standing at the bar is Alejandro Cedeño, a loyal customer, who says he has a lot of mixed feelings. Others have arrived: the old lady who once fainted, stood up and continued dancing; those that make up the long toilet queue; The professor of Cuban studies... There's Armando Suárez, the guaguancó dancer who believes that there's something that's never going to go away: "I imagine there's going to be another place where we can meet again."
Maritza hasn't stopped selling drinks and drinks, as if people believed that by buying all the drinks from the last night they were in time to save the life of the bar. When the bar closes, Maritza doesn't know how she'll spend her nights cooped up at home. During the day, she plans to recover old habits that work took away from her: going to the gym, eating healthy, resting more, having time alone with Ernesto. You see a lot more people coming. They hug Maritza and thank her. It doesn't seem like the last day in anyone's life. Do you think it's the last day? Maritza avoids the idea: "I've been thinking for a month that it's not the last month, that it's not the last week, and today that it's not the last night."
Maritza Rodríguez, owner of 'Mi Salsa Kitchen', prepares a drink at the bar. Juan Caballero
The rumba is getting louder and louder. People barely have room to dance. Roger's voice is heard saying, "This is the last rumba we sing in your abode." The people, who are now choirs, repeat everything Roger is saying. At one point Roger yells, "Hail Mary, how hot," and everyone says "how hot!" under the 12-degree Manhattan sky. They have had to remove the tables to gain space. There is no room for a soul. Out of so many voices, it seems like a single voice. From so many people, it looks like the same body mass. Román Díaz, the rumbero mayor, arrives. Everyone knows they're watching a legend play. He arrives taciturn, wearing his usual glasses and a beret. Román is rather expressionless: "All goodbyes are sad, there's a song that says so." I want to know what song it is. "I don't know what song it is, but it exists."
When the rumba ends, later than usual, people don't leave, but keep hanging around. They don't look like the last moments of a bar, there are no rituals or farewell words. People behave like every night in recent times. Some grab their coats and go outside to smoke. Then they come in and sit at the bar. It's late, past two o'clock in the morning. Maritza comes out suddenly. Police have asked them to be quiet, a neighbor called to complain. Maritza comes in and gives the order. You have to go. No one is leaving. Someone breaks a bottle and Estuario appears to collect the glasses, a Paraguayan who has been without documents in the city for more than forty years and who cleans the bar when everyone leaves. The only ones who have the privilege of getting to know Estuario are the early risers. People remain as if they want to extend the time of the bar's life, but it's time to leave. Tomorrow we have to clear tables, dismantle paintings, count all the bottles that were not taken, all the food that was not eaten, to take them to a storage room in the Bronx. No one listens. The bar eventually closed.