Cuban cuisine (finally) finds a home in Burlington with Santiago's restaurant

One of the most anticipated restaurant openings of the year in Burlington establishes something Vermont has barely seen on its food scene – Cuban cuisine.

What is the place?

Open since Aug. 2, Santiago’s occupies a long-vacant space near the Burlington waterfront, adjacent to the recently revived Union Station/Amtrak stop. The family-recipe-powered menu at Santiago’s provides a succinct and succulent introduction to Cuban food and culture.

The sharable appetizer offerings include chicharrones (fried pork belly), red-snapper ceviche and a patria y vida sampler letting diners taste meaty Cuban specialties such as lechon (marinated roast pork), picadillo (ground beef cooked with vegetables, wine and light tomato sauce) and ropa vieja, the Cuban national dish consisting of shredded beef in tomato sauce.

Those three meat-based items show up on the entrée menu as well. Creole shrimp and a Cubano sandwich built around ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese and mustard (on bread shipped from a bakery in Ybor City, the Cuban neighborhood in Tampa, Florida) also showcase foods commonly found on the Caribbean island. The dessert menu entices with Cuban sweets such as flan and the sponge cake known as tres leche.

The restaurant has seating capacity for 76 customers inside and 80 or so on the outdoor patio. Co-owners Oscar Arencibia, who oversees the food at Santiago’s, and Luis Calderin, in charge of what he calls the restaurant’s “atmosphere,” decorated Santiago’s with stylized tiles, bistro chairs and arches. The look is modern yet fits the traditions of Cuban design.

Calderin said he and Arencibia wanted to nod to tradition but avoid being “kitschy.” Instead, he said, Santiago’s aims for “tropical chic,” a more “contemporary, beautiful, sexy experience.”

The idea, the two said, is that Santiago’s is like a Caribbean excursion, whether in late summer or the depths of a cold February in northern Vermont.

“It’s a vacation from your everyday,” according to Arencibia, who said it’s always a comfortable 74 degrees at Santiago’s.

What’s the story behind it?

This isn’t the first go-round for Santiago’s. Arencibia has been king of the pop-ups since April 2021, when he began offering food once a week under the Santiago’s name at the Zachary’s Pizza Family Center in South Burlington.

He moved onto pop-ups at the former Heart n Soul restaurant in Essex Junction. In late 2021 he began, as Calderin put it, to “play” with running a restaurant for four months at Carina Driscoll’s New North End eatery now known as Butter Bar & Grill.

That was around the time Calderin got involved with Santiago’s, drawn by Arencibia’s tribute to his heritage. Calderin’s family is from Cuba; he was born in Miami and moved to Burlington at a young age in 1986, where he found few Cuban people and no Cuban food.

Arencibia is a more-recent transplant, a native of northern New Jersey who moved to Vermont in 2015. He worked for years in the solar industry but harbored a desire to tell the story of his Cuban-American culture through food.

Like Arencibia, Calderin has no previous experience running a restaurant; he’s known primarily in Burlington for working in marketing and as a club DJ. They took that lack of experience under consideration as they plunged into opening Santiago’s into a space tucked near Union Station that formerly housed restaurants including Mona’s and Madera’s.

“We were very serious and we were also extremely cognizant of the fact that we are, for lack of a better term, ‘neophytes’ in the restaurant industry,” according to Arencibia.

Calderin took on what he called the “market research” task, visiting Cuban restaurants while traveling to get a sense of how others succeed in the business. Arencibia listened to podcasts and read books about running restaurants. Calderin applied his marketing savvy to tracking down investors – some local as well as partners from Boston who invest in restaurant and retail businesses – to get Santiago’s off the ground.

They also leaned on the experience and fandom of local restaurateurs. Santiago’s had built a reputation and plenty of buzz in town through its pop-ups, so other restaurant operators were happy to help. Calderin said Sue Bette from Bluebird Barbecue contributed tables that her Burlington restaurant no longer needed. Charles Reeves, who for 25 years ran the popular Burlington breakfast-and-lunch spot Penny Cluse Café before closing in December, loaned plates after a kink in the supply chain delayed dishware Santiago’s had ordered.

“Everybody’s been eating on Penny Cluse plates for the last three weeks,” Calderin said Aug. 25.

That advance buzz has translated to strong business.

“I would say it has been significantly better than I expected,” said Calderin, who thought business would be good but is pleasantly surprised a long-vacant building off the well-traveled foot-traffic path has drawn customers. “Location could have been a limitation. Nothing has been here for five years.”

Arencibia said he’s not surprised at how good business is, but he was taken aback by how easy it was to find staffing in a post-pandemic restaurant world that has seen a struggle to hire employees. He said Santiago’s had more than 100 applicants for its 30 positions.

Calderin said he’s proud of how ethnically-diverse the Santiago’s staff is in one of the whitest states in the nation, and that the restaurant has drawn Cuban-expat customers from as far as Montreal and Plattsburgh, New York. Arencibia likes that he’s catering both to that Cuban-American clientele and those in Vermont who might not be so familiar with the food of his heritage.

“I get to share our culture with this community I’ve grown to love very, very much,” he said.

Hours and location

Santiago’s, 3 Main St., Burlington. 5-10 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday. (802) 540-2444, www.santiagosvt.com

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.

This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Santiago's restaurant offers Cuban flavors to diners in Burlington