Cuban Meets Chinese in Midtown
If any restaurant pays full homage to El Barrio Chino, Havana’s once-thriving Chinatown, it’s Calle Dao, on W. 39th Street in midtown Manhattan.
New York City has long been home to Cuban-Chinese, diner-style restaurants that are usually low on frills, but this restaurant is filled with distressed wood tables, spinning fans, tropical palm trees, Edison bulbs, and a vintage display of cigar boxes. Sultry salsa music packs the air, while the tables are filled with visitors who don’t necessarily have ties to either Cuba or China. All come to enjoy a unique fusion cuisine that isn’t as surprising as it sounds, and that includes dishes like Cuban sandwich spring rolls and 14-hour char sui pork.
Calle Dao is the invention of Italian-born restaurateur Marco Britti, who heard stories about El Barrio Chino from Cuban businessmen he met while visiting Miami. Britti came to understand how the area, while small, played a significant role in Cuban history.
Immigrants from China first came to Cuba in the 1840s to work as laborers. By the late 1870s, El Barrio Chino area occupied 44 square blocks of Havana real estate, and it was the largest such community in Latin America. As Cuban and Chinese cultures continued to mix, the result was a unique fusion of cuisines that shared common ingredients like port and duck. Today, El Barrio Chino occupies a small section of narrow Calle Cuchillo, or “Knife Street,” from which Calle Dao takes its name (“dao” means knife in Mandarin).
The restaurant doesn’t just cater to both Cuban and Chinese customers; Calle Dao now also has a regular base of Italian visitors who have come to know the restaurant through Britti. Many are clearly intrigued by the fusion of cuisines.
Recently, one such customer, Diego Franco, put it this way: “It is one of those spots you will constantly hit up when in the city because it is the only one restaurant that perfects the fusioned cuisines besides the Chinese neighborhood in Cuba. Conveniently enough, it’s in New York City, the center of the world, so why not indulge yourself in such unique flavor?”
