What Jonathan Gold is eating: <i>Pierna de puerco</i> at El Colmao

Last week, of course, President Obama made an official visit to Cuba, an occasion I like to think of as Nixon in China with plantains. Friends of mine think of Cuba and daydream about beaches, colonial architecture and brightly painted 1956 Ford sedans. I prefer to imagine access to guanabana daiquiris and charcoal-grilled grouper that finally has been drenched with enough mojo de ajo, but that’s probably just me.

I haven’t asked, but I am guessing that the owners of El Colmao are not celebrating renewed relations with the motherland. In my first days of visiting the Pico Union restaurant, possibly in the late 1970s, I was warned not even to mention the regime, because even a whisper of the name was likely to upset someone. I restricted conversation to mambo and the Dodgers instead.

Yet when the current entente was announced, the first thing I thought of was El Colmao’s pierna de puerco, sliced leg of pork basted with garlic, crisped on the griddle and crowned with a vast handful of sizzling fried onions, a majestic, caloric masterpiece of garlic, salt and meat.

Before the pork, you are going to want an avocado salad, and with it, you are going to have an order of fried tostones, green plantains smashed flat and fried to an exquisite crunch, as well as a glorious heap of moros y cristianos, which is rice and beans sauteed with enough fat pork to make you cry uncle. You will be drinking a cold half-liter of the sour house red wine, and you are going to finish with a Cuban espresso and maybe a sliver of flan.

Then you’ll go home and nap for the rest of the afternoon, serene in the knowledge that whatever happens to the Cuban embargo, it will never take away from this.

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