At Emelina in West Palm Beach, chefs dream of a Cuba that doesn’t exist

Two chefs set out to answer one question: What would modern Cuban cuisine taste like if a new generation brought global influences to the island — if creativity were no longer bound by decades of scarcity?

Their answer: Emelina.

Led by Osmel González and Camila Salazar, the West Palm Beach chef counter in June became the first Cuban restaurant in the world to earn a Michelin star, just four months after opening. González, who grew up in Cuba, cooks dishes, while Salazar, who’s Colombia-born, channels her husband’s memories into Emelina’s menu. Together, their vision bridges the island’s culinary past with an unwavering belief in its future.

González calls it “the Cuba we cannot have.”

“Emelina is the Cuba that we dare to dream,” he says. “I dream of a Cuba where people can travel, learn from other cultures, come back to the island and create new dishes.”

As a child, González’s family gatherings saw his father frying fish all day long on a Havana beach, under the shade of seagrape trees, while the adults drank rum and the kids crashed against the surf. At home the next morning, his mom would make fish-soup remedies to melt away any hangovers.

Now as an adult at the helm of Emelina, chef González is rebuilding this happy Cuban memory on a plate.

On a recent Wednesday night, he sets down a piece of dry-aged, tempura-battered red snapper in a wooden saucer with wave-like carvings, adding refried tomato paste, before tweezing Kaluga caviar onto a foamy cloud of fried egg and horseradish emulsion. Beside that, he fills a glass with amber-hued fish consommé, just like his mother once did. Pre-Revolution mambo and son spill warmly from the speakers.

As he slides the finished plates across the counter to his 15 guests, González asks them to drink the consommé last. Even as he turns back around to sprinkle salt, coriander and oregano on a trayful of duck-skin chicharrónes, he is hyperattentive, stealing side-eye glances to see if customers are listening. They are.

“It’s a beautiful story that we use to start the menu,” González says of his dish, a nod to the Miami-Cuban pan con minuta (fried-fish sandwich). “When you tell diners who lived in Cuba about this dish, they connect right away, because these people had the same memories of their family cooking whatever they could get their hands on, doing the same thing on the beach.”

A radical vision

Named after González’s late grandmother and inspired by her recipes, Emelina represents a victory lap for the couple. Their Miami Shores pop-up EntreNos — where González cooked and Salazar handled the books, as she does now — won a 2024 Michelin star (and a Michelin Green Star sustainability award a year later) before closing in mid-2025.

That’s when they partnered with Álvaro Pérez Miranda (of Michelin-starred Ogawa), a restaurateur-art dealer who secured the Flamingo Park Market location in West Palm Beach, previously home to acclaimed 10-seat chef counter Konro.

Emelina serves a modern Cuban tasting menu of 10 dishes cooked on the fly by González and assistant chefs, with Spanish and farm-to-table influences, plus Florida-sourced meats and produce. Lately, the Michelin luster has made Emelina so in-demand that dinner reservations — at $275 per person, including wine pairings — have been sold out a month in advance since June, he said.

The counter is a radical vision that South Florida Cubans haven’t witnessed since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, says food historian Ana Sofía Peláez, whose James Beard Award-nominated cookbook “The Cuban Table” frames the recipes of exiles through the lens of resilience and migration.