This Chef Is Redefining Cuban Comfort Food From a Kissimmee Food Truck

Amanda Melendez and her partner Claudia Mena built their following with a showstopper seven-hour pork dish. “All that we have learned has been, as we Cubans say, ‘a golpe.’” Amanda Melendez is explaining the success of her food truck in Kissimmee, Florida, and it’s quickly becoming clear that her popularity did not come by accident: It was forged out of fire. “A golpe” literally means “by blows,” and when Melendez says she learned that way, she means that she did so through struggle or sheer force of will. It would be easy to forget this while salivating over a plate of her cerdo asado, or roast pork, the meat falling apart under a gleaming sheet of crispy skin. Served over Cuban rice and beans with pickled onions, fried sweet plantains, and yuca, the knock-out dish makes customers feel at home. So too does warm, graceful service from Melendez and Claudia Mena, her partner in life and in business. But behind Chef Amanda’s brilliant cooking and impeccable service are two women who have worked tirelessly to build their business from the ground up. Chef Amanda’s food truck is known for cerdo asado, a roast pork dish served with rice and beans, pickled onions, and plantains. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez Beginnings Melendez was born and raised in Matanzas, Cuba in a family that cherished mealtime. “Food, for us, was more than food,” she recalls. “It was the moment where we would sit together, where we would share our culture.” Melendez’s grandmother Mirta would prepare delicious meals for her entire extended family: comfort dishes like carne frita, or fried meat, and macaroni with pork fill Melendez’s memories of childhood. “We don’t have that much abundance in Cuba,” Melendez says, “and my grandmother would resolve to feed us with whatever she could get her hands on.” In this way, young Amanda was raised in a culture of culinary innovation. “In Cuba, if something doesn’t exist, Cubans will invent it to feed their families,” Melendez says. At age 18, Melendez left the island nation for Miami, where she joined her father, who was already living there at the time. At first, Amanda wasn’t particularly interested in cooking. As a child, she left the cooking to her grandmother. In Miami, fate brought her just outside of the kitchen, as a server and a manager. “I worked, like we all do in this country, in gastronomy,” Melendez says. Her first job was in a Salvadorean restaurant, and her second was at a Cuban one. The experiences exposed her to cuisines from across Latin America—even her own. “I ate foods that people here say are Cuban dishes—that you don’t actually eat in Cuba,” she said, because of a lack of access to ingredients. She points out that ropa vieja, a slow-cooked, shredded beef dish that is famous in the United States, is rare in Cuba, because the slaughter and sale of beef is heavily regulated on the island. With time in the United States, Melendez would not only taste, but also innovate on Cuban dishes that were difficult to obtain back home. At her food truck, she plates a mini-serving of ropa vieja on crispy tostones (fried green plantains) for a small, punchy bite of Cuba. The truck’s take on ropa vieja. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez A chef is born Though Amanda’s transition to life in Miami was marked by abundance, she became a cook during a time of desperation: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. With nothing to do, she began to cook in her Miami home, her grandmother guiding her through Cuban classics. “Little by little,” she remembers, “my love for cooking emerged.” Claudia, who met Amanda while they were both waiting tables, could tell that she was tapping into a passion. “She pushed me to study it” seriously, Amanda says, and she did, enrolling in night classes at the María Moreno Culinary Institute in Miami. By night, she learned the fundamentals of French cooking, and by day she continued working at a Cuban restaurant in Miami. But that hustle was not paying off; the pandemic killed much of the business at her day job, so she needed to look for other opportunities. Again, her loved ones saw her talent, and encouraged her to nurture it. “My brother-in-law told me, ‘You cook well, why don’t you start a meal prep business?’” Amanda took to preparing lunches in her home kitchen that Claudia would deliver to clients around Miami. Over the course of several years, her business grew from 7 clients to 80, and she had to start cooking in a ghost kitchen to handle the volume. While at school she worked a punishing schedule: she would wake up at 3 A.M., cook until around 7, take a nap, then buy groceries for the next day before heading to classes from 7 P.M. to 11 P.M. at night. While Amanda was at school, the couple heard about an opportunity to buy a food truck, and they jumped on it. At first, they used the truck as a ghost kitchen. In 2024, Amanda graduated from Maria Moreno with a degree in culinary arts. She and Claudia continued with their catering business in Miami, but they dreamed of leaving the city so they could show Amanda’s cooking—Cuban food with global influences—to a non-Cuban public. Amanda’s father lives in Orlando, and on a trip to visit him, Amanda and Claudia were impressed by the area’s vibrant food truck scene. They wanted to become a part of it. They applied to join five or six food truck parks before getting a call from Food Trucks Heaven. The manager offered them a spot, but there was a catch: “You have to come before the end of the week because I only have one spot available,” Amanda recalls her telling Claudia over the phone. “We left for Orlando early the next morning.” From top: a Cuban-inflected take on arancini; cerdo asado; and arroz frito. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez A place in Food Trucks Heaven The first month in Kissimmee was “horrible,” Amanda remembers. One of the toughest parts of leaving was separating from her 90-year-old grandmother, whom she had lived with since arriving in the United States. On top of that, she left behind many other family members in the Miami area to move to a city where she knew no one besides her father. “Nobody knew who we were, and my food truck is named Chef Amanda,” says Melendez. “Who is Amanda? No one knows. It didn’t say ‘Cuban’ anywhere. It was horrible, horrible.” Amanda worked the kitchen of the pink food truck, and Claudia attended to customers. Melendez burnt herself cooking on her first day. There were days where Amanda and Claudia did not sell a single thing. “It was like when someone is just exhausting themselves, sacrificing so much, but with nothing to show for it,” Amanda remembers. “We realized the only way people would buy from us was if they learned about our food first.” Claudia and Amanda started to give away samples of cerdo asado, their show-stopper. Tourists started sharing images of the delicious, seven-hour slow-cooked pork on social media. Influencers stopped by. “We’ve grown little by little this way,” Amanda says. Seven months later, they sell so much that they’re having trouble keeping up with demand. Claudia says that Amanda’s biggest challenge is that she has trouble delegating her work to other people, but it’s time for her to hire a worker to help out. They’ve grown on the strength of Claudia’s hospitality and business acumen — Amanda calls her the “mastermind” of the operation — and Amanda’s innovative, soulful cooking. When the pair was still in Miami, Amanda’s professor, Yoher Vielma, helped them create a menu for their nascent food truck based in Cuban cooking, but with modern, global twists. “We make use of the original recipes with new techniques to create a fusion menu,” says Melendez. “Because society advances.” Take, for example, Amanda’s croquetas, a classic breaded fritter that on the island would be made with a doughy center. Amanda, taking notes from Spanish croquettes, makes hers with bechamel, so the crispy exterior gives way to a melt-in-your mouth interior. Or her arroz frito, a fried rice dish brought to Cuba by Chinese immigrants in the 1800s. She loaded hers with Cuban stir-fry ingredients—pork, pineapple, sweet plantains—but came up with her own sauce incorporating Japanese rather than Chinese ingredients. Her arroz con pollo arancini are particularly revelatory. The base of the dish is a yellow rice-and-chicken dish that Amanda says Cuban cooks use to transform a small amount of poultry into a large, filling meal. And in Melendez’s hands, the dish transforms once more. “It ends up with a texture like a risotto,” she says. She adds cheese while it’s hot, breads it, and fries it to make it crispy on the outside, and moist and flavorful on the inside. She cuts the richness of the fried rice balls with two salsas: one made of cream cheese and lemon; and another with Japanese mayonnaise, lemon, and aji amarillo, a Peruvian orange pepper. Customers have also been clamoring for her tarta vasca, a crustless Basque cheesecake, which she Cubanizes with a guava marmalade. The same marmalade is served with her queso frito, fried cubes of muenster cheese that are breaded and fried until tender on the inside but crunchy outside. “The cheese is spectacular,” she says. “People order a ton of it in the food truck.” Queso frito, fried muenster cheese, served with a guava marmalade. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez Many Cubans are “incredulous” when they see the menu. “They ask me, ‘This is Cuban?’” Amanda says. “We tell them, ‘Try it. If you don’t like it, I won’t charge you.’ “And what always happens? They’re surprised. They’re always surprised, because when they try it they realize that it is Cuban food.” The menu is filled with her delicious takes on Cuban classics, like pan con lechón, a roast pork sandwich, a Cuban sandwich, and the inimitable ropa vieja. Customers can wash it all down with pineapple, mango, guava, or mamey (a custardy, aromatic tropical fruit) juice. In fact, while certain visitors need convincing, some Cuban-American influencers have been sharing videos of themselves eating at her food truck, calling it the best Cuban food truck in Orlando and saying that it transports them right back to Cuba. And though Amanda loves winning over her compatriots, she is just as pleased when an American who isn’t as familiar with Latin American food tries her cooking. “They come to us and say, ‘This is the best Cuban sandwich I’ve ever eaten.’ That fills us up, really. It gives me more happiness, I promise you, than money could.” Chef Amanda Melendez with a dish of fried rice. Courtesy of Amanda Melendez From Kissimmee to the world Now that she’s developed a following in Kissimmee, Melendez says that she’s just getting started as a restaurateur. Next, she hopes to open another food truck in the Orlando metro area, and at some point, a brick-and-mortar. She and Claudia are also eying cities north of Florida where they can introduce her takes on Cuban cuisine to Americans who might be unfamiliar with it. Getting there won’t be easy, but she and Claudia are more than up to the challenge. “You’ll fall, you’ll hit a thousand obstacles, Amanda says. “But you can’t give up.” She encourages people who are hesitant to follow their dreams to take a leap. “Anything you want in this world you can achieve, but you have to believe in yourself unconditionally,” she said. Though Amanda’s dreams are grand, they are simple at their core: She likes feeding people. “It makes me happy when someone smiles when they eat something I made.” she says. “I want everyone to experience that.”

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