Photo by Anne Fishbein


SOME YEARS AGO — SIX OR SEVEN — I WROTE A FEATURE STORY ABOUT a small, informal cooking competition: Xiomara Ardolina, owner of Xiomara in Pasadena, was having a cook-off wherein she pitted herself against the restaurant's then-chef, Patrick Healy. Healy was cooking Nuevo Latino dishes — food based on Latin recipes and ingredients but prepared using classical French techniques. I remember in particular a small, sophisticated tamale filled with ground shrimp. Ardolina, on the other hand, was cooking the authentic Cuban cuisine of her childhood. Both were excellent cooks, but two dishes from that night really lodged in my mind: The first was Ardolina's roast marinated pork leg, a huge, unabashed boulder of a roast infused with citrus and garlic; the other was her fufu, mashed plantain studded with crunchy bits of chicarrone. Since then, I have eaten Cuban roast pork and fufu at every opportunity, and nothing has quite measured up.


So it was thrilling to learn that Ardolina has opened a small café on Union Street in Pasadena, serving authentic, gently priced Cuban cuisine — and the new Café Atlantic is right around the corner from her eponymous long-standing Nuevo Latino restaurant on Raymond Avenue. Ardolina took over a small coffeehouse, painted the walls the colors of Dijon mustard, ground cumin and red wine, added a bathroom to obtain a (still pending) beer-and-wine license and has since spent weeks in the kitchen cooking and training her staff to do what she manages so effortlessly in her own home: prepare flavorful, simple Cuban dishes.


Well, let me modify that. Ardolina uses the same high-quality ingredients at Café Atlantic that she does at Xiomara, and — she can't help it — the food and its preparation have a sheen that may provoke some Versailles die-hards to quibble with the term authentic. The made-to-order tortilla española (an egg/frittata-like dish with potatoes), for example, is made with applewood-smoked bacon and served with a pretty arrangement of little red pear tomatoes that are so ripe and sweet they shouldn't even exist in January. The arroz con pollo is pungent with excellent saffron, and the meat itself, slow-roasted with sticky-crisp skin, is more tender and moist than any ordinary super-
market fryer.


On rare occasions, the posh ingredients can actually work against a dish; the pressed sandwich cubano, with its thin slices of kosher dill pickles, mild Black Forest ham, pork and strong Swiss cheese, is good in and of itself, but it bears only a subtle intellectual relationship to the generic fast-food cubano, with its salty ham, hamburger pickles and loud yellow mustard.


But these are small quibbles with a strong menu. Start with lamb croquettes, crunchy tubes filled with velvety, puréed spiced meats, or bacalao fritters, salt cod and potato balls with a gratifying deep-fried crust and a cool cilantro-spiked tartar sauce. Or soft pork tamales, drenched in hot mojo (Cuba's ubiquitous citrus-garlic sauce). Ajiaco, a stew of chewy jerked beef and Cuban vegetables — boniato, yucca, malanga, plantains — is the perfect one-dish meal for a chilly winter evening, should we ever get such a night.


Cuban cooking in general, and this menu in particular, is a rhapsody of garlic and onions, sofrito (sautéed aromatic vegetables) and mojo — it's all about flavor, and here, the flavors are as bold and spirited as the Cuban jazz on the tape deck. Rabo encendido, meaty, cartilaginous oxtails slow-cooked in red wine, sits on white rice with tostones (breaded fried green plantain). Picadillo-spiced ground beef conquers on two fronts: flavor (it's cooked in fresh tomatoes and sofrito, then accented with capers and olives) and texture (a curiously pleasurable nubbliness). It's served with white rice and dead-ripe, sweet caramelized plantains. A marinated, sautéed bistec topped with startlingly green fried parsley and lazy threads of onions raises the question: How do you get so much flavor into one thin piece of meat?


You'll get plenty to eat, but it's also tempting to load up on side dishes, including the best black beans in the city, and steamed yuca steeped in mojo, and, of course, fufu de platanos con chicharrones, the rich mash of semiripe plantains and crunchy pork rind. Among the desserts, I wish the flan and bread pudding were served just with a scattering of those astonishingly sweet, big ripe berries and without that gratuitous rich custard sauce; and I love the pretzel-shaped, curiously moist and crunchy fritters made of boniato and set to drift in a pool of syrup scented with star anise.


Café Atlantic also continues the former tenant's tradition of selling coffee drinks and baked goods, although these days that means muffins, madeleines and guava- and cheese-filled Cuban pastries. The breakfast menu offers oatmeal, French toast, pork hash caballo-style, and Cuban country-style eggs — eggs with black beans, rock shrimp and manchego cheese. There is also an al fresco deli menu that's useful for nearby lunching office workers — pre-made roast-beef sandwiches, pressed (grilled) sandwiches, fruit cups. Two of Xiomara's specialties from Patrick Healy's tenure have resurfaced at this address: You can buy the duck foie gras terrine, and even the fabulous cassoulet to go. Fresh juices are squeezed or — in the case of guarapo, which is made from sugar cane — extracted to order.


As for my long-dreamed-of marinated leg of pork? I've ordered it four times, and, well, the progress is steady, but memory is an exacting mistress, and so far she's not satisfied. After all, such pork is best sliced right off the bone within hours after it comes out of the oven. Reheated, it's never quite as succulent and fresh. I have no doubt that when Café Atlantic is running at full tilt, and going through a whole pork leg or two or three a day, my fondness for the meat will become an epidemic: pork on the brain.


Café Atlantic, 53 E. Union St., Pasadena; (626) 796-7350. Open seven days for breakfast, lunch and dinner 6 a.m.-10 p.m. No alcohol. Street parking. Entrées $11-$14. AE, D, DC, MC, V.