09th Mar 2004
Lights Dimming for Cuban-Chinese Restaurants, Tacita de Oro Closes
Bummer. My favorite place for rotisserie chicken, Tacita de Oro (”The Golden Cup”), a hole-in-the-wall restaurant at 2625 Broadway at 99th Street, has closed. A sign in the window says that after 30 years in that location, their landlord has refused to renew their lease. The restaurant graciously thanks their customers for their years loyal patronage, and…that’s it.
What’s particularly poignant about the closure is that the place was part of a curious, dying breed of restaurant classified as Cuban Chinese. I don’t know how common Cuban Chinese restaurants are elsewhere — Miami is the only other place I could imagine them — but they’re a NYC phenomenon I’ve appreciated since visiting the city in my childhood. As far as I can tell, not only are they primarily a NY phenomenon but they seem to be particularly an Upper West Side phenomenon. This article on Cuban Chinese restaurants explains that Havana had a large Chinese population, but many of those folks fled to the U.S. when Castro took over. A small number of them opened restaurants in NY where they served a combination of Chinese and Cuban fare. The most famous of these is La Caridad on Broadway and 79th Street, but their likes are dotted up into the 90s around Broadway and Amsterdam. Now, the proprietors of such places are getting on in years and I fear, as the article I link to suggests, more and more will be going the way of Tacita de Oro in the coming years.
I wonder if they’d sell the recipe for that chicken marinade…
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