“I’m doing it all over again,” says Berta Navarro as she whirs around Havana Express, setting down knives and forks and speaking Spanish to two workers behind the front counter. Navarro and her son, Ricky Miranda, who together own Cafe 28 at the corner of Irving Park and Ravenswood, opened this spin-off next door in March. “I think we’re crazy,” she says. “We have enough work already.”
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When they bought Cafe 28 in October 1995, it was a one-room Cuban restaurant serving breakfast and lunch only. Since then it has expanded twice. The first time was in 1998, when Navarro and Miranda created a second room to accommodate demand for the dinner menu they’d created in 1996, which offers traditional Cuban and Mexican food side by side with more upscale new-Latin cooking. Their second growth spurt is Havana Express, where the prices are lower and the service is quicker. The kitchen whips up breakfast items like French toast stuffed with bananas, cream cheese, and brown sugar; a spinach, portobello, and feta frittata; and pastel de guava, a Cuban pastry made with phyllo and dripping with fruit puree, baked on the premises. To drink there’s horchata (the traditional Latin American rice drink) as well as cappuccino, freshly pressed orange juice, and a melon batido (shake). It’s open only on weekdays, and only until 3 PM. “We’re going back to where we started,” says Miranda.
At the Francis W. Parker School, Miranda’s classmates predicted he would go into the restaurant business. “When I wound up in charge of the hot dog stand at the school fair, I put in bratwurst,” he says. “I was always known for food.” He went on to study business at Loyola, then worked as a waiter at Carlucci and Scoozi and later as a wine salesman. “Some cooks I met in the wine business now work [at Cafe 28],” he says.
To which Miranda adds, “She’s my partner, but she’s always the mother.”
