For the sake of thematic consistency, B and I went to Victor’s 1959 Café for lunch this week. It was my idea, I admit; I thought the comparison with Babalu, our destination last week, would be interesting. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that similar cuisine isn’t in itself sufficient commonality for the purpose—like comparing apples and oranges because they’re both fruit!

Victor’s is literally a shack. Tucked away in a residential South Minneapolis neighborhood, with barely space enough for the occupants of a couple of the four-plexes on its block, it neither seeks nor gets much visibility. I was surprised to find out from our waitress that the restaurant is only four years old; it looks like it was established in, well, 1959.

Much money was spared in furnishing Victor’s. The table cloths are plastic, the booths could have been constructed by an amateur carpenter, the floor in the main room is unevenly laid brick. The room sports one potted tree, the pot in this case being a big blue plastic bucket.

But to criticize Victor’s for its inelegance is to miss the point entirely. Photographs of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, T-shirts with "Cuban Refugee Camp" and "Stoppa USA Blockad" messages, and posters of Cuban events cover the walls, and the restaurant’s motto is "revolutionary Cuban cooking." In other words, if you believe in the Socialist revolution, it’s unconscionable to turn a restaurant into designer-space-cum-art-gallery-cum-gourmet-kitchen.

The ethic-over-aesthetic philosophy is not likely to appeal to your typical hedonist diner, but Victor’s doesn’t want her anyway. And as for writing a review of it … how bourgeois!

For what it’s worth, then, Victor’s serves breakfast and lunch, and the breakfast menu is also available lunchtime. The latter includes American and Cuban selections plus scrambled eggs in variations named "Basque" (containing, e.g., chorizo), "Greek" (feta), and "Cuban" (black beans and plantains). The American choices include a number of pancake preparations, including not just the usual blueberry but also wild rice and banana, and "The Professor Stavrov Special," two eggs with American fries with cayenne pepper. The Cubano breakfasts include mango pancakes and waffles, a simple Continental breakfast with Cuban toast and café con leché, and half-a-dozen egg preparations featuring various combinations of black beans, fried plantains, creole sauce, steak, tostones, and rice; toast with guava jam or corn tortillas come on the side.

The lunch menu is mostly sandwiches, the sole exception being a vegetarian rice dish. Apart from a hamburger, a BLT, and a grilled cheese sandwiches, the other listings are all Cuba-inspired. Cuban-style bread is the common wrapper and yucca fries or plantain chips the common accompaniments. Several of the sandwiches feature pork and/or ham and/or chorizo; chicken and steak sandiwches and a black bean burger are also available. Prices are very reasonable, the sandwich items generally in the $6 to $7 range.

There’s no beer or wine, but you can imbibe topical fruit juices: mango, guava, and a combination called guanabana.

B and I split a fried plantain appetizer to start; chunks of plantain sautéed until caramelized and gooey-soft. Rather sweet for an appetizer, this would be good as a stand-alone snack. For my main dish I got the "Bay of Pigs" sandwich, which is basically pulled pork in toasted Cuban-style bread with the restaurant’s own mojo sauce. It would be hard to think of a simpler sandwich; I haven’t omitted any ingredient. But it was certainly substantial enough; the pork was piled high and the lateral dimensions were large as well. The mojo was light, tart, and garlicky. One of my pet peeves about sandwiches in restaurants is a soggy bottom-piece of bread—the result of sauce runoff—and the fault was especially egregious in this instance. Eating the sandwich was perforce a knife-and-fork undertaking. The pork itself was moist and tasty in an unadorned way, and the yucca fries were done very well—to a light golden color and not to the point of dryness (a point in Victor’s favor over my Babalu experience on one factor on which a comparison is appropriate).

We tried to order dessert, but were informed by our waitress—an attractive and friendly young woman sporting an "Eating with the Enemy" T-shirt—that Victor’s doesn’t have any. I wouldn’t have thought that a flan would be a sign of capitalist excess.

In a way, Victor’s can be seen as a shrewd marketing exercise. If you insist on wearing your politics on your sleeve or your back your appeal will never be universal. On the other hand, many a normally discerning diner will overlook the soggy sandwich or the absence of dessert if she thinks your heart is in the right place. I’ll wager a gourmet meal that Victor is incapable of this level of guile, but objectivity must be maintained. My verdict: food—so-so; etc.—charming.

A

You know that this isn’t your average Cuban restaurant as you walk through the doors. There is the famous (or infamous depending on your political inclinations) Ché Guevara poster—recognized from Argentina to Zimbabwe—on a wall exhorting the revolution. The contrast between this restaurant and last weeks Babalu couldn’t be greater. Babalu represents Cuban longings for an imaginary homeland, fueled by a sense of American well being, whereas Victor 1959 is the gritty reality of Cuba. Instead of the Miami cigar culture here you’ll find Cuban peasant pictures, trinkets and other memorabilia from the Cold War (some from as far away as Berlin). The restaurant is located in a tiny building – a shack almost. Bricks unevenly line the floor. The walls are a light ochre supporting a rather low ceiling. The seating is booths and there isn’t room here to swing the proverbial cat.

The menu is very egalitarian; there are no expensive wines on the menu. Indeed there is no wine (or beer for that matter) to be had and all items are priced to suit the pockets of the proletariat. The restaurant closes at 2:30 PM and hence only caters for breakfast and lunch. The fare is, as you might expect, traditionally Cuban with a few nods to the Gringo realities it finds itself in. We started with an order of platanos (fried sweet plantains): a gooey concoction of plantains covered with a layer of fat, a most uninspiring dish. The choices of drinks are limited to mango juice, guava juice and guanabana. I had the mango juice which was weak as water and straight out of a can. This had me wistfully recalling the wonderfully fresh mangoes that I had eaten just a couple of weeks ago in South Africa. Later I switched to the guava juice with not much improvement, but can you really complain when the price is a buck seventy-five? The lunch menu lists several varieties of the Cuban pork sandwich: Cuban pork barbecue (shredded pork loin drenched in a mango-guava barbecue sauce, served with Cuban style bread), sandwich Cubano (add ham, pickles, Swiss and mustard to the prior sandwich), Victor’s Cubano special (as before but in addition add a Spanish chorizo sausage) and Bay of Pigs sandwich (served as before but with a special "mojo"; a favorite of CIA operatives I am told). In addition there is a chicken and a vegetarian sandwich as well. The breakfast menu is split between American and Cuban entrées. The American breakfast is of the fairly run-of-the-mill variety (French toast, fried eggs, etc.) with the exception of banana pancakes. For the intellectually inclined there is the Professor Stavrov (a Russian scientist in Havana...?) special consisting of eggs, American fries served with cayenne peppers and onions. The Cuban breakfast has mango pancakes and eggs done in all styles; what makes them Cuban—I suppose—is the addition of ingredients like plantains, Creole sauces and Cuban style black beans.

Pork is de rigueur in a Cuban restaurant and I also know if there is pork on the menu A will invariably order it; instead I thought I’d order something from the Cuban revolutionary breakfast menu. I had the Cuban style scrambled eggs; these came with the omnipresent plantains and a serving of black beans and toast. The scrambled eggs were perhaps slightly overcooked but nevertheless worked well with the black beans. A simple yet satisfying meal. We tried to order dessert but none was available; this could be a restaurant trying to be true to its revolutionary Cuban roots where dessert might be frowned upon as an unnecessary decadent extravagance. The service was friendly and prompt. The diners appeared to be regulars and the one waitress on duty seemed to know them all. The bill, without the customary coffee and dessert, came to $20.00.

I wonder if the owners of Victor's 1959 Café have a clever marketing strategy based upon Minneapolis being a forward thinking, liberal city, that would be sympathetic to the cause of the Cuban revolution rather than the draconian measures adopted against the small island nation. I also had some excellent Cuban food in South Africa, where there is small Cuban community, mostly doctors working in South African state run hospitals. (As some of you might know, Cuba sent soldiers, tanks and fighter jets to Mozambique—during the apartheid era in South Africa—to support the ANC guerillas in their struggle against white rule in South Africa. After the fall of apartheid Cubans, former enemies, were now welcome in the new South Africa as was their cuisine but I digress).

Victor's 1959 Café is hard to find and may not have a great kitchen but it has tons of atmosphere. So do as our waitress’s t-shirt recommends, come and dine with the (friendly) enemy.