Tucked almost out of sight in the Albertsons parking lot off West College Drive, Lorenzo’s has introduced a different taste to Durango’s Southwestern palate.
Though a sign misleadingly advertising a former Mexican restaurant still looms over the small establishment, Lorenzo’s opened as the community’s only Cuban eatery last December.
“We love feeding people,” Jose “Lorenzo” Sanchez said of his new enterprise that he owns with his wife, Leslie. “We’d wanted to have a restaurant for years, and we’ve been in business for ourselves our whole lives.”
A Cuban native, Sanchez immigrated to Miami with his family at the age of 9 in the early ’60s, around the time of the Bay of Pigs.
“There was an atheist culture with communism there, and my dad didn’t want his kids growing up with no God,” Sanchez said.
He moved with his family to Miami, then to Albuquerque, where he met his wife while both were working in the jewelry business. Then, the lure of mountains and the outdoors brought them to Durango in 2000.
Though a Durangoan for more than 15 years, the tropical, humid climate and flower-pocked hillsides of Havana’s outskirts are clear in Sanchez’s memory of a childhood spent running around “wearing nothing but elastic shorts.”
Italians, Spaniards, native Indians and French Guianese – Cuba was a port through which everyone passed, he said, bringing their own food and resulting in a convergence of culinary influences.
Learning to cook came later in America.
“I learned from my mom,” Sanchez said. “When I was 18, I decided I wanted to learn how to make this food because she wasn’t going to be around forever.”
He learned that Cuban cooking is rooted in patience (pork and other meats marinate for a day then are slow-cooked for six hours) and layers of flavor, and that food is integral to family culture.
“In Cuba, food is love and love is food,” Sanchez said. “If your dad works late, you wait for him to get home before eating. And the first thing you offer someone who comes to the house is something to eat.”
With a name derived from Sanchez’s persona as Leslie’s flamboyant hairdresser (an inside joke), Lorenzo’s operates from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays, serving empanadas (crispy meat pies), picadillo (spicy ground beef), sofrito (a base sauce inherent to Latin American cooking), and the cornerstone of all Cuban meals, black beans and rice with fried plantains – the Cuban equivalent of an American potato side dish.
In contrast to Jose Sanchez, Leslie Sanchez is German-Irish, or “as gringo as they come,” her husband says, but she grew up in New Mexico. Her father was a good cook and taught her New Mexican cooking, which creeps into Lorenzo’s menu, mainly in the form of green and red chili.
Customers have been receptive, and the biggest surprise for the Sanchezes as new business owners is Durango’s tolerance for heat.
“We thought the salsa would be too spicy, but they like it hot,” Sanchez said.
“There’s Mexican food, American food and barbecue here. We want to introduce Durango to something different.”
jpace@durangoherald.com
