Sam Diminich’s Journey to Cuba For ‘The Most Important Meal I’ve Ever Cooked’ – Charlotte Magazine

When Sam Diminich met Alberto González, they didn’t say much. They couldn’t. Diminich didn’t speak Spanish, and González didn’t speak much English. But cooking is a universal language, so when they met in Havana in February, they knew what to do. They went to a nearby street market and bought food, mostly cucumbers, tomatoes, and Cuban ingredients like yuca, guavas, and calabazas, a kind of squash.

Then they went into the tiny kitchen of González’s 10-seat restaurant and cooked a seven-course meal for 20 guests, most of them members of a special tour of Havana set up in Charlotte. “There’s magic in improvisation,” Diminich says. “It’s like walking a tightrope.”

That meal was special for another reason: Everyone involved believes it’s the first time an American chef has gone to Havana to cook with a Cuban chef in decades. It’s definitely the first time it’s happened with a Cuban chef and restaurant owner under Cuba’s newly relaxed rules, which allow private businesses that aren’t government-controlled. “Cuban tradition was out of my wheelhouse,” says Diminich, the chef and owner of Charlotte’s Restaurant Constance. “I took it as a challenge. I didn’t know the Cuban people would steal my heart.”

Diminich, 47, has made a far tougher journey, from loss and addiction to recovery. He grew up in the restaurant business. His family owned several restaurants in Myrtle Beach, most of them “Italian-ish,” he says. He started working in a kitchen as a kid, running in after baseball practice, drawn to the bustle of a busy restaurant. 

Unfortunately, he was drawn to the darker side of the kitchen world as well—the easy access to alcohol and drugs. By the time he was an adult, he was struggling with addiction. He walked out on his wife and two kids. His life spiraled until he was homeless and living in his car. 

After many tries at detox and rehabilitation programs, he got clean and sober in 2014 and started to put his life back together. By 2019, he was executive chef at Upstream in SouthPark and went on the Food Network’s Beat Bobby Flay. He won, and he gained a new following when the episode aired in January 2020. 

Then came March 2020. The pandemic hit the restaurant industry like a sledgehammer, shuttering kitchens and shattering lives. Diminich got laid off and had no way to earn a living. “I was dying inside to lose a restaurant,” he says. He became so desperate that he applied for a job at Amazon’s Charlotte warehouse. They told him they’d give him an answer in two weeks. “I didn’t have two weeks,” he says. He was down to $700 with rent to pay and two kids to support. 

That’s when he got what he calls “the dumbest idea I ever had.” His local farmer friends were panicking. The spring harvest was coming in with no markets to sell it.

On March 23, three days after the official shutdown in North Carolina, Diminich used the little money he had left to buy a bunch of produce from local farms, took it into his apartment kitchen, and came up with a three-course meal. He posted it to Facebook, offering to deliver dinner, thinking no one would respond. To his amazement, the meals sold out immediately. Diminich’s business, Your Farms Your Table, was born. 

He kept it up, and he started finding private chef work. One former Upstream customer called in a panic because her daughter was getting married, and the caterer had pulled out. Former Panthers player Christian McCaffrey called, looking for a private chef. Slowly, Diminich built a new base of customers. “You do the legwork,” he says, “God opens the door.”

By 2023, he was able to open Restaurant Constance, named for his daughter, to immediate local acclaim. He still uses his kitchen and staff to provide low-cost meals to residential rehab programs. And he hosts meetings of Ben’s Friends, an addiction support group for food workers, every week. “My living amends,” he calls it.

Havana from the Tribe Caribe Cayo Hueso hotel. Blue rooftop cisterns provide water for each building.

So how did this lead Diminich to Cuba? It started with Trish Ellington, the owner of Centerline Adventures in Charlotte, which specializes in group tours to Cuba. Ellington first went to Cuba in 2011, after a friend in Miami invited her. “I couldn’t figure out why I would want to go,” she says. Cuba was still a mostly closed country, a mysterious place to most Americans who only knew it for the rocky years after the Revolution in 1959 and the Soviet Union’s involvement in the 1960s—the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Ellington didn’t expect what she found. “It totally changed my life and my feelings,” she says. “They’re an incredibly wonderful group, determined to make their lives as happy as they can under the circumstances.” The circumstances are tough and have been for 65 years: a lack of supplies, a Cuban peso that isn’t worth much, a lack of support and infrastructure, and an American embargo on goods from Cuba.

Diminich with Trish Ellington, who owns Centerline Adventures, a Charlotte-based travel company that specializes in group trips to Cuba.

Russia removed its support after the USSR collapsed in 1991, which led to critical shortages of food and supplies. Even today, buildings are pockmarked and falling down. Several generations usually live in a single apartment. Blue cisterns dot the roofs of every building to provide water. Anyone who can tries to find work that puts them in contact with American tourists to get U.S. dollars, but they often have to leave the country to find much to buy.

Things are changing, though, starting with then-President Barack Obama’s 2016 visit and Fidel Castro’s death the same year. Since 2021, President Miguel Díaz-Canel has allowed a new system of privately owned shops and restaurants. Ellington has been taking tour groups to Cuba for years, everyone from Hemingway lookalikes to baseball player Wade Boggs and a TV crew. (Cuba is baseball-crazy.)

“The interest is unbelievable,” she says. “People are amazed that they can go, and it’s so easy to do.” Ellington is particularly interested in food experiences. “A lot of people think it’s just rice and beans. But there’s great chefs over there.”

She really wanted to get an American chef to Cuba. Her destination manager in Havana, Daniel Perez, was friends with chef Alberto González. González is a native of Cuba who grew up cooking with his grandmother but moved to Spain to train as a chef and spent years cooking in Italy. He earned a Michelin star at Sauro, a restaurant in Milan. But he came back to Cuba in 2013 to take part in the changes and open SalchiPizza, eventually adding enough tables to seat 10. 

So Ellington had a Cuban chef. She just needed an American one. That’s when her former daughter-in-law, Natalie Luttrell, suggested her boyfriend, Sam Diminich, who had never been to Cuba. “I was initially a little suspect,” he says.

González, a native of Cuba, earned a Michelin star at Sauro, a restaurant in Milan. He returned in 2013 and opened SalchiPizza (above and below). The restaurant normally seats 10 guests, but 20 squeezed in for the tour group’s dinner.

Diminich knew a little about Latin American cooking and nothing about Cuban food, which shows more influence from Spain. His impression of the cuisine was “simplicity—doing a lot with a little. A lot of condiments—lots of salsa and crema.” Then he got there. “No condiments, no sauces,” he says. The Cuban soil is poor, and fertilizer is expensive, so fruits, vegetables, and crop yields can be smaller than in America.

Although Diminich deliberately didn’t do much research before the trip so he’d be open to whatever he found, he and González exchanged a few messages before the trip using translation apps. Diminich asked González what he could bring. “Spices,” González replied. “Can you get grains of paradise?”

One of Diminich’s sponsors is Motown Spices, which packed a box full of spices. When González opened it, Diminich says, “it was like New Year’s Eve.” On Feb. 6, the night of their collaborative dinner, Diminich was taken aback by González’s kitchen: A four-burner propane stove with barely enough BTUs to boil water. Diminich’s “workstation” was a cutting board about the size of a clipboard. Under it were a couple of cubbies with salt and some unidentified neutral oil. 

There was no walk-in, the ubiquitous refrigerator in American restaurants that’s about the size of a small room, with shelves loaded with fresh produce and meat and prepped sauces. They had the produce they’d bought that morning, some pork, and lamb that a friend of González had brought from his farm. 

Diminich put together a salad and asked for the dry storage, expecting to find olive oil, vinegar, and mustard for a vinaigrette. He just got puzzled looks. So he improvised, chopping guavas into a paste, adding honey, vinegar, salt and pepper, and a little of the neutral oil to create a passable salad dressing. 

They put fish soup in bowls from González’s bread and turned out plates from the fresh vegetables, pork, and lamb they had on hand. When they realized there was no dessert, González pulled out a plastic container of a dessert his grandmother taught him, a rum-soaked bread dish called torrejas. They whipped up a guava syrup to drizzle over it and sent it out. It was one of the hits of the night. 

Lamb with chicory and calabaza

Pork belly terrine and torrejas

A dessert of bread soaked in rum, preserved tomatoes, stewed guava, and farmer’s cheese

At about 5 o’clock, Diminich looked around and realized there was no wait staff. No one to roll flatware in napkins, no one to set the tables. So he rushed into the tiny dining room and did it himself, squeezing 20 seats into the space for 10. 

Diminich was continuously stunned by what people manage to do with so little—and the way food is used to communicate, even when we don’t speak the same language. 

When the dinner was served, González introduced the courses. Listening to him and seeing the excitement, Diminich thought: I probably just cooked the most important meal of my life.

“They think I’m here to lift them up,” he says. “They were lifting me up. I can ugly-cry just thinking about it.”

Diminich; Ellior McKenzie, the dinner group’s tour guide; González; Ellington; and Daniel Perez, Ellington’s destination manager and a friend of González’s, share a joyous moment at dinner.

By the time he came back to Charlotte, Diminich had made a decision: He wants to do it again. He and Ellington plan another chef collaboration tour in September. This time, Diminich wants to cook three dinners, each with a different Cuban chef and a different theme. 

He’s working on his Spanish with a woman who works at Restaurant Constance, and he wants to return with ingredients from North and South Carolina, like Sea Island red peas from the low country. 

After Cuba’s 65 years of hardship and shortage, Diminich found a place of excitement and a feeling that something is starting to happen. After his own long journey, he wants to keep using his platform. “I was so buoyed by the resilience, the joy,” he says. “This is the best version of Cuba they’ve ever known.”

KATHLEEN PURVIS is a longtime Charlotte writer who covers Southern food and culture.