Tropical Taste [Pictures]

LTH,

I'm driving up North Ave around lunch last week and zip by an tasty looking awning....I mean an awning that looks like it will taste good......I mean.......oh hell, you know what I mean.

I swing around, cage rock star parking, and head in to a cozy little place that smells like grandma's house, that is if your grandmother was Dominican.



A few nicely spaced tables, 3- tier chicken rotisserie and mouth-watering scents drift from outsize pots in the open kitchen. I'm in mild sensory overload so default to Rotisserie chicken with pickled red onion and a side of Arroz con Gandules. Chicken was tasty, bit of crisp from the gas fired rotisserie, good flavor, though not the deep savory penetration of the now shuttered Pico Rico.

Tropical Taste Rotisserie Chicken



While the focus is Dominican, they have Mondongo (innards/tripe soup) Saturday and Sunday and Sancocho on Sundays, Puerto Rican and Cuban are represented as well as Chinese. Chinese? I chatted a bit with a group of three fellows who assured me Tropical Taste's Chinese was not to be missed. Though they were having rotisserie chicken, tostones and a great looking plate of Bacalao en Salsa w/yuca for lunch.

Bacalao en Salsa w/yuca


Tostones


Enjoyable lunch, I've going to try to get back this week for bacalao (salt cod) or Chivo Guisado (goat stew) I might wait a bit on the Dominican Chinese.

Enjoy
Gary

Tropical Taste Restaurant
3330 W North Ave
Chicago, IL 60647
773-395-0804

G Wiv wrote:Puerto Rican and Cuban are represented as well as Chinese. Chinese? I chatted a bit with a group of three fellows who assured me Tropical Taste's Chinese was not to be missed.

Oddly, on a man-cation some years ago in Puerto Rico, I noticed several Chinese places in San Juan, and my sense is that this is a somewhat popular cuisine there (unlike, say, Polish or Japanese). The reason for this might be that it's relatively "light" food (and so sits easy on the stomach in a tropical climate), is good over rice (very popular in PR and Cuba), and somewhat inexpensive.

Excellent pix, as always. Those onions are pickled, I'm guessing?

Hammond

David Hammond wrote:Those onions are pickled, I'm guessing?

Sí , which is Spanish for yes.

G Wiv wrote:Puerto Rican and Cuban are represented as well as Chinese. Chinese? I chatted a bit with a group of three fellows who assured me Tropical Taste's Chinese was not to be missed. Though they were having rotisserie chicken, tostones and a great looking plate of Bacalao en Salsa w/yuca for lunch.

Having a curiosity about hyphenated-chinese (and really all sorts of fusions, hybrids, and bastardizations), I did a little sniffing on this one. I did find a section on the Dominican Republic in the general Chinatowns in Latin America article of the Wikipedia. From those three or four sentences, it sounds like Chinese immigration to the DR dates back to the 70s. (Here are some interview transcriptions with a Chinese man who emigrated to DR but then to New York.) Not exactly the stuff of legendary traditions, but the proof is in the tasting.

Coincidentally, this week's Globe Trekker (a PBS travel program) focused on Chinatowns around the world. (I think it was a rerun.) The segment on Malaysia had some nice coverage of street food, and in Peru they had Chinese cuy (guinea pig). The "Globe Trekker Extra" (five minutes on another topic squeezed in to the hour-block) was about food festivals, with very brief segments on the Tomatina tomato flinging fest in Spain, a similar battle with oranges (Ivrea, Italy), and the Gilroy Garlic Festival (California). I don't know if it's available "On Demand".

Nice to see Tropical Taste is still going strong. There was discussion of it long ago on the pre-LTH site.

Hammond, the reason for the Chinese places in Cuba, DR, PR, Peru, Ecuador, parts of Mexico and I'm sure other Latin American countries is straightforward-- Chinese immigration, largely coinciding with the big rail boom in the US,

Viva chaulfan. (AKA chow fun.)

PS, was writing the above when the immediate prior post was logged. While direct Chinese immigration might have come later to the DR, there was a Chinatown in Havana when there were Chinatowns in NY/CHI/SF. There's a long-standing Chinese cultural and culinary presence in the Caribbean and continental Latin America...

Fried rice places are common enough: the chaulfan at Mi Ciudad (Ecuadorano) is nice, and has a kitchen sink approach, including Vienna sausages. A favorite Cuban cafe in Tampa, Arco Iris, offers bistek palomilla or milanesa on arroz frito, and Bayless recently featured a Mexican fried rice stand on his show.

From what I recall, interviewing Brianna's abuela, there definetly was a Chinatown in Cuba, probably still is (will ask). The subject arose when I was recipied fried rice -- I questioned the origins and was of course told that every rice culture has recipes for fried rice -- yet further questions revealed the Chinese influence.

Note to self: when asking Abuela about Chinatown, ask about Russian influences on the cuisine of Cuba.

-ramon

Coincidently enough, I just started reading Havana Salsa: Stories and Recipes. On pages 22 and 23, Viviana Carballo briefly mentions stopping by a Chinese fruit and vegetable stand on Galiano street and dining at El Pacifico in Chinatown in what must be the early 40s. She described how many of the dishes they ate were not on the menu. She also called wontons fried butterflies, which is kind of cute.

-ramon

JeffB wrote:PS, was writing the above when the immediate prior post was logged. While direct Chinese immigration might have come later to the DR, there was a Chinatown in Havana when there were Chinatowns in NY/CHI/SF. There's a long-standing Chinese cultural and culinary presence in the Caribbean and continental Latin America...

Fried rice places are common enough: the chaulfan at Mi Ciudad (Ecuadorano) is nice, and has a kitchen sink approach, including Vienna sausages. A favorite Cuban cafe in Tampa, Arco Iris, offers bistek palomilla or milanesa on arroz frito, and Bayless recently featured a Mexican fried rice stand on his show.

And of course Peruvian lomo saltado.

Ramon, see my prior post. Chinatown is in one of the older parts of Havana, Cayo Hueso. Happens to be where my father-in-law grew up. (He's not Chinese-Cuban, but there are some relatives by marriage meeting that description.)

I think Jeff or I or someone else mentioned before on this board that New York (and some towns in North Jersey) abounds (or at least did abound) in little joints serving both Chinese and comida criolla; when I was a young lad, I would check them out on occasion. Most of them looked pretty shabby or even awful but some served up very tasty food.

Incidentally, there are some Chinese-Cubans here in Chicagoland -- this I know from the fact that one of my teammates is Chinese-Cuban. And she's a hell of a hockey player too. Big fan of La Unica, as well.

Antonius