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Food guide

How to find good Cuban food

Cuban food is garlic, citrus, cumin and slow time. There is almost no chilli heat in it, which surprises people who expect Caribbean cooking to be hot, and the flavour comes from mojo — sour orange and crushed garlic — rather than from spice.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • A working sandwich press — The cubano is pressed until the bread is thin, crisp and fused. A sandwich assembled and not pressed is a different, lesser thing.
  • Real Cuban bread — Lard in the dough, thin crackly crust, airy inside. It is what makes a cubano work and it is the component most often substituted.
  • Mojo you can smell — Sour orange, garlic, oregano, cumin. Pork marinated in it overnight. If the roast pork tastes only of salt, the mojo was an afterthought.
  • A ventanita — The walk-up window. A café with one is serving the neighbourhood's daily coffee habit, not just its lunch trade.
  • Black beans cooked separately — Frijoles negros should have their own seasoning and a bay-leaf depth, not be a scoop from a can beside the rice.

What to order

  • Cubano — Roast pork, ham, Swiss, pickles, mustard, pressed. Miami's version has no salami; Tampa's does, and both camps are certain.
  • Ropa vieja — Shredded beef braised with peppers and tomato, with rice and plantains.
  • Lechon asado — Mojo-marinated roast pork. The Sunday dish.
  • Cafecito and pastelito — Sweet espresso at the window with a guava pastry. A daily ritual, not a dessert.
  • Tostones or maduros — Twice-fried green plantain, or sweet ripe plantain. Order whichever the rest of the plate is not.

Where to find Cuban food

Open listings put 1,797 Cuban restaurants across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

Miami, FL 187 Hialeah, FL 99 Tampa, FL 73 New York, NY 49 Miami Beach, FL 38 Chicago, IL 38 Orlando, FL 23 Cape Coral, FL 19 Fort Lauderdale, FL 17 Doral, FL 17 Louisville, KY 16 Los Angeles, CA 16

Campuses with the most within a mile

Touro University 16 FIT 16 CUNY Graduate Center 15 NYU 14 MDC 14 Baruch 13 The New School 11 John Jay 8 FIU 7 Hunter 7

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Cuban searches read for pressed-sandwich and Cuban-bread language, plus ventanita and cafecito mentions, which indicate a café serving a community rather than a restaurant serving a concept. Bread quality is what reviewers actually talk about when a cubano is good, and that is what the matcher looks for.

Find Cuban food near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to eat when you're broke Where to take friends visiting from out of town Where to eat before a flight