The city by the sea
By Varela
I know a lot of friendly waiters at the Versailles Restaurant, but the best one waits on me today. I ask him for a plate of scallops and he shakes his head as if someone were interrogating him and torturing him in Guantánamo. When I ask him for a shrimp cocktail, he rolls his eyes to the ceiling and brings his thumb and forefinger together to signify that they’re too small, what in Cuban we call a “mirringuita.”
Well, I skip the appetizers and go to the main dish. I ask for snapper. He unravels. He almost drops his notepad and pen.
His body language is something else. You’ve got to pay attention to his signs, as if you were playing ball and he were your third-base coach and you were the runner about to steal. If you don’t heed him, you’ll be OUT – which at the Versailles means with a dose of food poisoning.
Finally, the waiter holds me at second with some verbal advice.
“My friend, never order seafood here. The only fresh dish today is shredded beef. I believe the grouper soup is made with the heads of those fish they find floating belly-up in the Gulf of Mexico, due to that oil spill.” And that’s the truth; my waiter doesn’t exaggerate. Eating fish in Cuban Miami is scary. They serve it to you covered with flies, as if the insects were part of the garnish.
I don’t understand why, in a city by the sea, the fish is old in almost all Cuban eateries. In the American restaurants, they serve fresh fish, but it seems that Cuban restaurateurs buy the discards from Watson Island. In Miami, you have to hook the fish yourself. Or go to the Key Biscayne marina and buy it from the fishermen at the dock. What’s hard to find there is not fresh fish but a good price.
Gone are the days of El Capitán, that place near the river where the yellow-tail snappers swam in a water tank in the middle of the place and you told the waiter “the red one, over there” and they pulled it out by the gill, scaled it while it was still flopping, and fried it. It almost saddened you to eat it. Your conscience bothered you.
This time, just to bug my Versailles confidant, I insist on seafood. How about the Valencian paella? (Holy mother of God, why did I ask that?) He sticks out his tongue, clutches the back of a chair and shakes as if the Holy Ghost had seized him. Diners at other tables applaud his performance. Sometimes I think he missed his calling and should be in the theater, not in the restaurant business.
He recovers from the seizure, grabs me by the shoulder, leans over as if to kiss me and whispers in my ear: “Don’t even think it. The squid is anonymous and the crab is generic.” I can barely decipher his cybernetic and pharmaceutical euphemisms. But, heck, I finally decide on a couple of fried eggs with ripe plantains and white rice. My wife asks for coffee, light, ’cause she’s on a diet. For that, we could have stayed home.
At least, I should be grateful to my friends. They keep me from spending a weekend in the hospital with salmonella. As I pay, someone asks my waiter, “Have you got grouper soup?” He answers: “Yes. Want a large or a small bowl?” “A large one,” comes the order.
I leave my tip, grab my wife and flee.
Outside, I see pickets hollering against Silvio Rodríguez. Outside the Versailles there’s always pickets hollering against someone. I’m ready to believe that they’re hired by the restaurant’s management to attract and entertain customers, as if they were musicians, clowns or magicians.
But the passers-by see the hoopla and hear the noise made by four geezers waving signs as if it were something natural – part of the landscape, because “it’s the Versailles.”
I cross the street and see a Cuban pharmacy, one of the few left that are not part of an American chain. That’s why it’s still around, I realize. Because it’s the place where the diners can go for a stomach elixir and the pickets can find a soothing syrup for their throats, raspy from all that hollering.
