Puerto Sagua, at the corner of Collins Avenue and Seventh Street in Miami’s South Beach, hasn’t changed much since it opened in 1962. Like some of my favorite restaurants in New Orleans and San Francisco, Puerto Sagua will always be Puerto Sagua, no matter what is happening outside its polished, paneled walls. When I walk inside, it could be the 1980s and my first visit to Miami as a teenager—the neon-lit art deco hotels on Collins and hip dance spots on Ocean Drive straight out of my Miami Vice dreams—or it could be 2024, when I brought my own teenager, or it might even be the early 1960s, when Sean Connery, Muhammad Ali, or Murph the Surf perhaps dropped in for a Cuban sandwich.
Ornate murals and pictures of Cuba decorate the spaces between tables. I almost always sit up by the kitchen to order a café con leche and Perico Scrambled Eggs. The Colombian dish consists of eggs cooked with green peppers, tomatoes, and onions. With a side of crisp Cuban toast, it’s absolute breakfast perfection. At lunch, I sometimes can’t decide between the roast pork with rice and beans, ham croquetas, or ropa vieja, a personal favorite made of shredded beef and sofrito, literally translated as “old clothes.”
If I’m there later, I’ll order more café con leche and possibly the best Cuban sandwich ever made. People in Tampa—where I spent much of my newspaper reporting career in the 1990s—will probably take offense at that take. To Floridians, a Cuban sandwich is very much like a barbecue sandwich to someone from the rest of the South: Everyone makes them, and everyone has opinions on how they are made best. Roast pork, sliced ham, mustard, Swiss cheese, and pickles, but God help anyone who tries to make a Cuban sandwich with a basic baguette. It’s the local bread, the artful construction of the sandwich at Puerto Sagua, the buttering before the hot press, and the diagonal slicing that make it irresistible.
You also never know whom you’ll run into at Puerto Sagua. On my last visit, when I was showing my son around old Miami, we sat next to a drunken couple arguing over all their sordid sexual affairs. At one point, I was concerned there might be a brawl, but the waitress patiently handed them a menu to get them thinking about the food. It worked.
Families, tourists, locals, and even the famous love Puerto Sagua.
In 2006, I was lucky enough to have a two-day layover in Miami while on book tour. I purposely asked for a hotel in South Beach, not for the nightlife, but for Puerto Sagua. I walked into the restaurant early in the morning, a bit worried they’d updated the place, but instead found everything as I’d left it. I’m often reminded of the wonderful days of 1980s South Beach in my late friend Elmore Leonard’s LaBrava. (Mitchell Kaplan, the longtime owner of the local Books & Books shops who grew up in Miami Beach, calls LaBrava perhaps the best novel ever written about Miami.) Gangsters, grifters, and hustlers populate the crime novel, about an ex–Secret Service agent who falls in love with an aging noir actress in trouble.
I was thinking about LaBrava and whom Tarantino might cast as the central hero when I looked to my right at the bar to find Harvey Keitel grabbing breakfast. It was later in the morning, Puerto Sagua wasn’t that crowded, and the Pulp Fiction actor and I soon struck up a conversation. He was dressed in heavy workout clothes, his sweaty hair pulled back into a ponytail. We talked about books and the movie he was making in town. With the retro decor and the deep Miami vibes, I felt like I’d entered the world of Get Shorty (in which Keitel has an uncredited cameo). I figured this to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, only to return the next day after my signing at Books & Books in Coral Gables to find Keitel back on the same stool. Like me, he was hooked.
The last time I was in Miami, last summer, I hung out with my great friend Gaspar González, the documentary filmmaker of Muhammad Ali: Made in Miami and Hecho a Mano: Creativity in Exile. We talked a lot about cigars, rum, old Miami, what had been and what remained. Naturally, Puerto Sagua came up.
“Though not as famed as Versailles, Puerto Sagua has its own lore,” González said, referencing the best-known Cuban restaurant in Miami. “When I was a kid, a trip to the beach usually included a stop at Puerto Sagua for a milkshake and a Cuban sandwich. Ferdie Pacheco [Ali’s fight doctor] used to tell me about the gang from the 5th Street Gym going there for lunch. It was also a must after a night of carousing on the ‘new’ South Beach of the late eighties and early nineties, but that’s another chapter. It’s a small miracle it has survived the real estate churn-and-burn.”
I can’t think of a better way to describe the beloved Cuban restaurant than a small miracle. For me, it’s the Miami version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. So much energy, humanity, and wonderful, authentic food on that corner of Collins and Seventh. You never know whom you’ll meet or what you’ll overhear. Just thinking about the café con leche, served with the Cuban coffee in a silver pitcher to add to your steamed milk, makes me long to return. And I will.
