Author: Katherine Alex Beaven / Source: Atlas Obscura
Crafting the perfect Cuban sandwich involves a near-sacred ritual, and rules that leave little wiggle room for variation. A proper Cuban requires ham, pork, Swiss cheese, pickles, and mustard, and—depending if you make them in the style of Miami or Tampa—Genoa salami.
(In Miami, adding salami is considered blasphemous, while nearly 300 miles away in Tampa, it’s a marker of true authenticity.)Some purists believe that even switching up the order of how ingredients are added can throw off a Cuban’s delicate balance. So when someone finds a recipe that works, it becomes religion. That’s especially true of Tampa’s legendary Columbia Restaurant, the country’s oldest Hispanic restaurant. There, chefs dole out over 600 Cubans daily using the same family recipe that’s been a mainstay since 1915.
But for Hyunmin Cho and Geunmin Kang, the owners of the South Korean sandwich shop Tampa Sandwich Bar, in Seoul, the invitation to compete in Tampa against the storied Columbia Restaurant and dozens of other local and international vendors at the 2017 International Cuban Sandwich Festival “was a dream come true”. Some of their competitors had been churning out Cubans for over a century. Kang and Cho had started making them less than two years before the festival.
The festival, started in 2012 by the Cuban-American Tampa resident Victor Padilla, claims responsibility for heating up the rivalry between Tampa and Miami—particularly on where the sandwich was born. Fittingly, the three-day festival and competition takes place in historic Ybor City, the disputed (but never dethroned) birthplace of the Cuban sandwich.
Unsurprisingly, it is the place to prove yourself—and your sandwich. After learning that Kang and Cho’s Seoul-based Tampa Sandwich Bar menu focused on Cuban sandwiches, Padilla knew he needed them at the festival.During the first two days at the festival, he heard rumblings that attendees were “raving” about Tampa Sandwich Bar. “They barely lasted an hour—both days—before they were out of food.” On Friday and Saturday, lines were so long that even Padilla himself had a hard time getting his hands on a taste. Then on Sunday, the festival’s competition day, they won the popular vote, placing first in the Most Popular Sandwich category (a victory they repeated in 2018). Kang and Cho were so taken aback by the win that at first they stood cheering for themselves, not realizing they’d won.
The winning didn’t stop there. Tampa Sandwich Bar snagged third in the Tampa Historic Traditional category, where contenders must utilize the controversial Genoa salami. Not a bad haul for two newcomers who had taken their first bites of authentic Tampa Cubans mere days before the competition.
It was also a coup for two friends who met in night school, and who both dreamed of starting their own food businesses. After talking over beers, they decided to go into business together, though they had no clue what they might sell. One night, while watching the movie Chef, they were inspired by the main character’s courage in following his dream—opening a food truck that sold Miami-style Cuban sandwiches. But Kang and Cho still had zero experience in restaurants and minimal experience with the Cuban sandwich.
Kang mentions she had tried a Cuban sandwich once in Korea (one she now feels had been “slightly modified…
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