YAMIR PÉREZ

A dessert disruptor and private chef, with 30+ years of architecture and award winning industrial & interior design career walked away from it 5 years ago and became a pastry chef. Best known locally for his uniquely crafted and award wining CAKE & CAKES dessert company, is opening a new café of sorts. Inspired by the richness of his Cuban cultural heritage and the present raw crumbled state of El Vedado, the neighborhood in Havana where he was born and lived at as a young boy.

Nostalgic for the traditional Cuban café menus he grew up enjoying in South Florida, and coaxed by Cuban and Armenian friends, he has now created CUBANACÁN, a “Cuban Café and Dessert Bar” in South Palm Springs with a more modern point of view. Where values instilled by his family shows, creating a place for his guest to enjoy, feel comfortable in and where before entering, one leaves their egos, titles and pretense at the door so that everyone feels like you’re eating at his home.

CONCEPT + INSPIRATION

CUBANACÁN is an elevated Cuban cafe and dessert bar that pairs with selected spirits and an exclusive Cuban coffee selection. Inspired by the beauty of age, texture and reflection of his culture, yet rooted in the elegance of Old Havana. The cafe reimagines the Cuban the working class “cafetria” through elevated traditional sandwiches, refined sweets, Cuban coffee styles, and a warm, timeworn sense of place. The intentionally small menu focuses on traditional sandwiches with familiar but elevated sides, served with hyper-effervescent bubbles and playful sophistication. It also reinterprets the Cuban pastry culture through refined desserts that somehow still feels like home. The menu is not a fusion with dishes of other latin counties; it is a Cuban being soulfully-playful.

CUBANACÁN presents quiet luxury to the table where everything feels fresh, balanced and highly intentional in a modestly scaled space with only 40 seat capacity which include two areas for a more intimate bottle service made available by reservation only. CUBANACÁN keeps it small so that service stays intimate and feels like the reliable neighborhood café. Designed to evoke a poetic, dreamlike postcard from Cuba where dreams and memories blur beautifully together, celebrating Cuba’s rich past through a quiet modern lens.

Architectural elements depict the raw crumbled remains of present day Cuba while the patina surfaces, selected materials and weathered walls provide an aesthetic that reminds us of the long gone beauty of elegance and pre-revolution world class status Cuba once had. Selected furnishings, lighting and objects from the 20s-Midcentury past are accented with cubist Cuban art, nostalgic family photos, respectful displays of the Taino indigenous people and glimpses of deities rooted from the Cuban Afro religious history emitting a warm and luminous aura for all to receive.

CUBANACÁN; …cubao (fertile/abundant land) and nacán (middle or center). Historical evidence indicates the term was used by the indigenous people to describe the island of Cuba to its prominent geographical position in the Caribbean, and it is widely considered the etymological root of the word Cuba.