THE MANGO GANG
The Mango Gang was born after a run on Miami Beach. The ‘pregnancy’ of course took much longer. But on a specific morning in 1992 I finished my run from 1440 Ocean Drive to Joe’s Stone Crab then back and returned panting to the steps of The Betsy Ross Hotel where I had been working at a restaurant I created and named, “a Mano”, Spanish for ‘by hand’. The owner was lounging nonchalantly on the front steps still up from the night before. He was with actor-pugilist Mickey Rourke. It was like Crockett and Tubbs as drawn by Ralph Steadman. Despite the louche scene in front of me … while on my run I’d come up with much more ‘what if’ kinds of thoughts. I turned back around away from the damaged men and faced the water line and saw big ships floating in the distant water and realized somehow we needed to depict the spirit of the times in a culinary form. So I reached out to the other chefs in South Florida back then about the idea of doing a cookbook together.
As luck would have it we were soon able to meet at The Turnberry Resort while we were all part of a big fund raiser. In between prep mania we went off to the chef’s office to have a chat. To my amazement everyone in the room agreed quickly to do the project. The mad mix of Miami then was a new and exotic orchid coming to life. I had only recently arrived from Key West and I was just learning the distinction of the neighborhoods.
The members aside from myself were Douglas Rodriguez, Allen Susser and Mark Militello. Douglas was cooking in Coral Gables at the original “Yuca” restaurant. Yuca was not only a very popular Caribbean tuber but an acronym for “young, upscale, Cuban American”. He was the chef in town back then that made me laugh in the way you laugh at a kind of creative brilliance. He understood the cooking of his parents and of the Cuban émigrés that made Miami their new home. He had it down cold in his quick mind and he also had it zipping through his hot Latin blood. And then he did what chefs do if they have the mad chops. He turned it on its head! He actually re-grasped it with love and homage and showed generations past that Cuban cuisine should not be rooted and fixed but moving and flowing outward. His near robust need for the power of expressing it in flavors, textures, shapes and juxtapositions conjured up the Pop Artist greats that were so incredibly contemporary that they confused the old guard for seeming less ‘artistic’ when in fact it was a fusion of the common with the classic in a kind of street ‘cred’ way.
Mark Militello was cooking in North Miami and heavily California-Mediterranean in his take on cuisine. He had a command of technique that made his restaurant immensely popular. Allen was trained in part in France and the touches of that Gallic classicism framed his food. But Allen was also in love with Florida’s ingredients. I was the only one thus far published, my cookbook, “Feast of Sunlight”. Perhaps that was what spurred me to seek the collaboration first. I figured if we banded together we would enjoy each other’s successes more. We got an agent named John Harrisson who found fast reception with publishing houses in New York. Suddenly it was ‘game on’. Each of us, in our own way, used Miami as our culinary laboratory. Tropical fruits and tubers became starring members on menus and visitors who came to taste this new frontier were forced to learn a new lexicon in cuisine. The menus were a modern patois of half a dozen languages. It threw some of the old guard writers off and a few scoffed. But soon The New York Times, The London Times and even Time Magazine were talking about “The “Mango Gang”.
It had been happening all over the country in different ways. Charlie Trotter had done it in Illinois. Emeril was doing it in New Orleans cooking at the legendary Commander’s Palace still at that point. Dean Fearing, Robert Del Grande, Stephan Pyles and Mark Miller were doing it in their respective restaurants in Texas and New Mexico. The big ‘fire starter’ for me was Jeremiah Tower who created his ‘Great American Regional Menus” while working with Alice Waters in California during his time with the seer of Berkeley at ‘Chez Panisse’. Young American chefs all across the land were finding the voice and flavor of America again in distinctly regional voices and with a re-awakened love for pure ingredients and producers of them. Long before ‘farm to table’ became a catch phrase every important chef from Jean-Louis Palladin and Larry Forgione to Lydia Shire to Wolfgang Puck and Jean-Georges Vongerichten … all were busy hunting down the products that would more fully illustrating the region of his or her kitchens. Those of us in Florida had to lift off the yoke of stale expectations. For too long Florida was able to swan along based primarily on her good looks The fine weather and sandy beaches were not enough for those of us seeking to find our place within the sweeping winds and shifting tides of this New American Cuisine.
A new generation of Florida chefs had emerged and it is very exciting to be amidst them. Though I’m not quite at the age of Yeats when he wrote about that day in a school he was ‘walking among school children’ sometimes I feel that way as I see and taste the food they are making when I am with them. The sweet thing is they ask me what I think.
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A few months ago Miami stalwart chef and friend Michael Schwartz contacted me and asked me if I wanted to do another “Mango Gang” Dinner. I was surprised. It has been awhile after all. Then he told me it would be at his original restaurant in the Design District, (a favorite) and the others he would invite to cook with the two of us would be Allen Susser and Cindy Hutson. “Heck yeah!”, I answered. Hit the link for more about that event. It was written by a local journalist Michelle Muslera. She did a great job keeping it all together.