La Caridad 78 Is Back on 72nd Street Continuing the Cuban-Chinese Connection

By Anya Stiglitz and Souhon Cheung

When La Caridad 78, the iconic Cuban-Chinese restaurant on West 78th Street, closed during the pandemic, Upper West Siders mourned. The news even made the New York Times.  

For a New Yorker, it’s a tragedy when a beloved store or restaurant closes. It becomes a ghost of the city, remembered each time one turns a particular corner or walks down the street where the place is no longer. It remains part of our memories, and feelings of sadness and failure linger because our city could not keep a favorite place open.  

So this is a happy story.

We stopped by the new incarnation of La Caridad 78 — La Caridad 72 — to interview the manager, Miguel Yip, try the food, and meet the “younger generation,” who insisted on reopening, found a spot on the south side of West 72nd Street between Broadway and Columbus, renovated it, and kept the old favorites on the menu, including fried pork chops, ropa vieja, and steak with garlic.

Many of the dishes still come with a generous pile of rice and beans. The roast chicken was tender and juicy, the plantains perfectly cooked, the omelette with shrimp slightly overcooked. The new décor is warm and inviting, especially compared to the basic style of the 78th Street spot. Other diners were happily devouring plates of steaming food on a cold, late-November afternoon.

Welcome back! Word is spreading. “The old customers are coming by to say hello,” Yip says.

Much has been written about the Cuban-Chinese restaurants in New York City. Food and cultural-studies scholars have explored this community. In a 2008 paper, Berkeley Professor Lok Siu described the migration of Chinese laborers to Cuba in the 19th century, the inhumane working conditions they found there, and their subsequent migrations to New York City. She interviewed La Caridad 78 waiters, as well as the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Lee, and noted that the Cuban-Chinese restaurants were intriguing because they were the only place where the Asian-Latino population was made visible by “boldly announcing and affirming [its] existence.” For Professor Siu, these restaurants made a powerful contribution to the culture of New York and the Upper West Side.

“By inventing this new bicultural pairing, they have created something distinct … that challenges our conventional notions of what/who is Latin American, and what/who is Chinese, as well as the idea that they are disparately separate,” wrote Siu. Today a few other Cuban-Chinese restaurants still exist in the ‘hood, including La Nueva Victoria on Broadway and West 96th Street with Dominican-Chinese owners, and La Dinastia at 145 West 72nd Street, owned by Peruvian-Chinese.

Miguel Yip, whom the staff call “Uncle”,  is part of this mix. His family left Toishan Guandong province in China sometime in the last century and moved to Cuba. Yip left Cuba in 1970, lived in Spain for two years, then moved to the U.S., where he got started in the restaurant business. “I did everything. I peeled potatoes. I cooked,” he said.

Yip worked at Caridad 78 and said it was the extended family of the last owner who were determined to revive the restaurant. They brought back the cooks from 78th Street and tried to bring back the waiters, but many had retired and didn’t want to return. Yip is eager to print fancier menus than the old laminated ones now in use. “They look like coffee shop menus. Am I right?” he asked.

The fact is, we old-timers hate change.

Yip says his old customers aren’t keen on the new delivery apps. They want to call the restaurant and order their food and have it brought over by a delivery guy on a bike. They still like the same old dishes as they did before.

Tom Dessereau, who left New York a few years ago, fondly remembers the 78th Street Caridad. “It was one of those places where you’d always strike up a conversation, where blue-collar workers from the neighborhood and wealthier residents would mix with someone down on their luck, using whatever dollars they could muster up for a plate of those mounds of rice and beans. The conversations from nearby tables were as varied as the languages and accents. I would sometimes go there alone, as much for a taste of the city I used to know, as for the down-home food. I miss that place.”

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