Thirty dollars is a real constraint and this city is a bad place to spend it on a single cuisine that barely exists here. San Francisco has a handful of Cuban restaurants and no Cuban neighbourhood, so a crawl in the Miami sense - six windows on one street - is not available at any price. What is available, and what actually works on a student budget, is to take a Cuban meal apart into its three components and buy each one from the kitchen in this city that does it best. Three stops, one neighbourhood, comfortably under thirty for two.
These three stops keep different hours and two of them close in the afternoon. Tell Karpo when you can be in the Mission and get them in the right order.
Why the straight version does not work here
Cuban migration to the United States after 1959 concentrated in South Florida and, secondarily, the New York area. Very little came to Northern California, and San Francisco's Latin American population formed instead around Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Nicaraguan origins, with a strong Peruvian presence citywide. The restaurants followed the communities, which is why the Mission has forty taquerias and pupuserias and a handful of Cuban rooms scattered across the whole city.
The consequence for a budget crawl is arithmetic. The few Cuban places here are single independent restaurants rather than counters, they are priced as restaurants, and they are not near each other. Two sit-down Cuban plates will use your thirty dollars and leave you having eaten one thing twice. Splitting the meal across cuisines costs less and eats better.
Stop one: the pressed sandwich, about ten dollars
The Cuban sandwich is the component most widely available in this city, because it appears on menus that are not otherwise Cuban - delis, cafés and Latin counters all make a version. Roast pork, ham, Swiss, pickle and mustard, pressed until the crust flattens and the cheese runs. Expect nine to twelve dollars, and split it: half a pressed sandwich alongside two more stops is the right amount.
Judge it on the bread. Proper Cuban bread is light and airy with a thin, brittle crust that crushes flat under the press. If it is made on ciabatta or a dense sourdough - which in this city is a real risk, given the local bread culture - it will be a heavy, chewy object rather than the light one it is meant to be. Ask what the bread is before you order; the good places will tell you happily.
Stop two: the pork and citrus plate, about twelve dollars
What you want from lechon asado or vaca frita is pork or beef cooked slowly, then crisped, then cut with acid. The Mission's version of that is carnitas: pork shoulder confited in its own fat for hours, then finished on a hot griddle so the edges crisp, served with lime, chopped onion, coriander and salsa. It is the same technique reaching the same place.
Order it as tacos rather than a burrito - three or four at three to five dollars each - because a burrito buries the crisped edges under rice and beans, which is exactly the texture you came for. Take a little of both salsas from the counter and the pickled carrots, which are a Bay Area signature and do the job pikliz or raw onion does in Caribbean cooking. Running total for two people: about twenty-two dollars.
Stop three: the sweet coffee, about five dollars
Cafecito is the one genuinely Cuban thing that is easy to find here, because it turns up wherever there is any Cuban or Caribbean presence at all. It is a small, aggressively sweetened espresso, shaken as it is pulled so it carries a pale foam; a cortadito is the same coffee cut with steamed milk. Two of them will cost four to six dollars and they are drunk standing up, in about four minutes.
This is deliberately the opposite of the third-wave coffee San Francisco is famous for - sweet rather than acidic, fast rather than considered, and social rather than solitary. It is also the correct ending to the meal you have just assembled, and it brings the total for two people to somewhere between twenty-six and twenty-nine dollars.
The cheaper substitution, if thirty is tight
Drop the sandwich and replace it with pupusas. Salvadoran pupusas are thick griddled corn cakes stuffed with cheese, beans or chicharrón, served with curtido - a sharp pickled cabbage slaw - and salsa roja. They are three to four dollars each, two is a meal, and the curtido performs precisely the acid-against-fat function that the pickle in a Cuban sandwich does.
That version - two pupusas, four carnitas tacos, two cafecitos - comes in around twenty dollars for two people and is arguably the better meal. Mission Street between roughly 16th and 24th has all of it within a few blocks, with BART stations at either end, so nothing about this requires a car or more than twenty minutes of walking.
Practical notes
Geography: Mission Street between 16th and 24th, BART at both ends, twelve minutes from downtown. Everything in this article is within a few blocks. Prices: Cuban sandwich nine to twelve dollars, tacos three to five each, pupusas three to four each, cafecito two to three. Timing: the counters run late by San Francisco standards and El Farolito goes past midnight, but the sandwich places and cafés mostly close in the afternoon or early evening - do those first. Cash is accepted everywhere and moves faster at busy counters. Split everything; portions here are large. And walk Mission Street rather than Valencia one block west, where the same afternoon costs three times as much.
Tags: #BestCubanFood #SanFrancisco #CheapEatsSF #MissionDistrict #CubanSandwich #Cafecito #Carnitas #Pupusas #Curtido #MissionStreet #BART #BackToSchool #StudentBudget #SFEats
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Ask Karpo first
A three-stop plan on a tight budget falls apart the moment one of the stops has closed. Ask Karpo which of these counters is open at the hour you can get to the Mission, where the nearest properly pressed Cuban sandwich actually is, and whether the cheaper pupusa version is the better call today.
