La Caridad is one of the last remaining Cuban-Chinese restaurants in Manhattan. Founded in the late sixties by Rafael Lee, a Chinese immigrant who first went to Cuba and then came to the United States, and now run by his son, it is still serving that strange and wonderful mix of Cuban and Chinese dishes at very reasonable prices. If you are not a New Yorker you may well be asking yourself, “What, why, and how Cuban-Chinese?” The answer is that many Chinese immigrated to Cuba during the mid-1800s to find work building the railroads, and again at the turn of the century and later when Chairman Mao came to power. At the beginning of the Cuban Revolution many Cuban-Chinese fled communism yet again and came to New York. It was here that they opened restaurants serving dishes reflective of their dual ancestry.
My first apartment was a mere two blocks away from La Caridad and therefore I could be found at its tables quite often. There were always at least a few taxis idling on the street outside with drivers eating the restaurant’s food from takeaway containers, because like the rest of us they knew that the food was good, the service lightning quick, and the prices absurdly low. The restaurant is almost like a kind of terrarium, as two sides of it are long glass windows looking onto Broadway and Seventy-Ninth Street. Pedestrians love to peer in as they wait at the bus stop just outside the entrance for the downtown Broadway local, just as customers will spend hours at one of the restaurant’s tables watching the shirtsleeved multitude outside bustle through their daily lives. It’s a modest-size place that seats about forty people, with no décor to speak of. The staff can be at times brusque but is for the most part friendly in that slightly jaded way that professional waiters are for the most part friendly.
One might order a wonton soup to start, followed by an oxtail stew or shrimp fried rice as an accompaniment to pulled beef in a rich brown sauce, known as ropa vieja, all for very affordable prices. Slightly-too-greasy but delicious fried chicken （mostly dark meat） with a side of yellow rice, red or black beans, fried plantains, and an avocado-and-onion salad would cost you somewhere between $6 and $8, as I recall. Obviously the prices have increased in the last forty years, but it is still very reasonable. Like other Cuban-Chinese restaurants years ago, it was one of the only places with an espresso machine, and although the coffee was not quite like they make it in Rome, it was a welcome respite from the acidic dishwater that passed for java at most of the coffee shops around. At La Caridad, a large oval plate of shrimp with yellow rice and peas and a side of black beans could sate a young actor for quite a few hours, until he got hungry again and was forced to make himself yet another dinner of pasta marinara washed down with the remains of a cheap bottle of red, because he had spent his allotment of cash for the day. But in his heart of hearts and stomach of stomachs, he knew it had been worth it.
Whenever I am in New York I go to the Upper West Side and visit the neighborhood I was thrilled to be a part of for so many years when I wore a younger man’s clothes. As I have said, it has changed distinctly, a bit for the better and a bit for the worse. It is safer and cleaner, but so much of the texture of the past has been lost. I still make a point of eating at La Caridad not only because I love it but because, along with most of my other dining haunts, all of the other Cuban-Chinese restaurants within a twenty-block radius have disappeared. Their square footage has been transformed into soulless cafés ruled by tattooed baristas who ask you for your first name so they can write it on your eco-cup and then scream it for all the world to hear when your order is ready. It is in these kinds of places that today one can purchase a cup of coffee for what, when I was young, was once the price of a hearty meal served with an unusual slice of ethnic culinary history on the side.II
I?As this goes to print, I have just discovered that Gage & Tollner has fortunately reopened.
II?While revising this chapter, I discovered that La Caridad closed abruptly on July 23, 2020. I don’t know the reason why, but like so many customers, I am heartbroken.
6
After we had been dating for four years, I married my late wife, Kathryn Spath, in 1995. She had two young children at the time. In 2000 we had twins, Nicolo and Isabel, and in 2002 she gave birth to our daughter Camilla. After being diagnosed in 2005 with stage-four breast cancer, she died four years later, in 2009, at the age of forty-seven. She was extraordinary as a mother, wife, and friend. She was highly intelligent, beautiful, kind, patient, and one of the best people I will ever know. I loved her and always will. Her death is still incomprehensible to me and her absence still unreal.