Conch: Island Style
It’s homely as hell, a giant sea snail with a nasty-looking horn that slips out of its shell to propel it along the ocean floor. But in the right hands, conch is a beautiful thing.
“Our new cooks look at it and say: ‘What is that?’” Montreal born chef Corinna Mozo, 51, laughs in describing reactions to the Caribbean mollusk that she turns into delicious fritters in the various kitchens of La Cubana, her taste-of-home Cuban restaurant chain in Toronto.
Mozo knew there was a lot to love about conch. She wanted the mollusk on the menu when she opened La Cubana in Roncesvalles Village with her husband Victor Coelho in 2013.
Mozo had only worked with conch once before, early in her 30- year career as a chef at Lydia Shire’s Biba in Boston. She knew well-prepared conch, like squid and octopus, can be meaty and chewy-tender, with mild, fresh-from-the-sea flavour. Prepare it poorly and you could be eating bland elastic bands.
Mozo first tried conch in Grenada, where it’s called lambie and pressure cooked to tenderness, then slowly stewed in rich onion-and-spice gravy.
She’d also eaten slivers of raw conch in a vibrant citrus-spiked vegetable salad in coastal Florida, the typical way it’s served in the Bahamas, where conch is a national dish.
Conch is also popular in Cuba, but on trips to her father’s Cuban homeland as a youngster, the family ate mostly rice and beans, or slow-roasted pork — foods that were available during rationing.
“We always stayed with my family. I think my love of cooking really came from there,” Mozo says. “Even though they had so little, there was always this close feeling of warmth and sharing and nobody complained.”
She may not have eaten conch with her family, but the crispy, deep-fried fritters are a popular Cuban dish, Mozo says on a sunny morning as she prepares a batch for us.
The decor of family-friendly La Cubana is inspired by the diner her grandfather ran in Camaguey in central Cuba.
As a kid, her dad, Emilio Mozo, now 77, often ran trays of sweet vanilla custard called natilla from his grandmother’s kitchen across the street to the diner. Of course, that’s on the La Cubana menu, too.
The conch fritters are also an homage to her dad, who left Cuba for Montreal as a teen just prior to the Cuban Revolution. His speciality is cod fritters, Mozo says.
“It’s not one of those dishes that you think of in Cuban cuisine like ropa vieja (pulled braised beef), or a staple like a pressed Cubano (sandwich), but conch is a staple of Cuban cuisine in Cuba,” Mozo says. “It’s readily available.”
For the fritters, Mozo juliennes raw conch and mixes it with diced sweet red pepper, onion, garlic and lime. Unlike the traditional Cuban version, she adds minced jalapeno for a kiss of heat.
She tosses the wet ingredients in a small amount of slightly sweet batter, just enough to hold the conch and vegetables together for deep frying. Mozo salts the fritters as they come out of the oil and serves them with a lime-spiked chipotle mayonnaise for dipping.
Mozo sells 50 to 60 orders of conch appetizers daily at La Cubana’s Ossington Avenue location and the Gerrard Street La Cubana, which is run by her brother, Pablo Mozo.
At the flagship La Cubana on Roncesvalles, she substitutes corn fritters as a nod to her large vegetarian clientele. Since Mozo didn’t want to cook veggie fritters in the same oil as the conch in the restaurant’s small tabletop fryer, she dropped the conch from that menu.
Conch is synonymous with Nassau and popular in many parts of the Caribbean. The large pink shells gave Key West residents their Conch Republic namesake.
But fewer people in Canada know about it. It’s popular in Caribbean restaurants and its much smaller whelk-like cousin is sometimes available as “conch” in Chinese or Japanese restaurants.
It’s likely rare to see it on menus here because fresh conch is impossible to get in Canada, Mozo says. “You can’t grab the shells and empty them out and pull out that huge, crazy-looking thing,” she says.
Mozo gets her conch flash frozen from Daily Seafood. The boxes contain the whole animal, complete with “lots of crazy little bits” to be trimmed and discarded, including the hornlike foot.
It’s expensive at $55 per kilogram, considering squid is less than half the price. So, for less than $5, her bowl of three good-sized fritters is an excellent deal.
The cost rises further by the amount of waste in trimming the conch down to the meaty centre, which Mozo butterflies to reveal the “beautiful white meat.”
Mozo splits the conch based on her chef’s instincts, which turns out to be exactly the right thing to do, according to Bahamian chef Ellison Davis, who is a master at conch preparation and used to head the Conch Shack at the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar Resort in Nassau, Bahamas.
Davis, who studied at the culinary school at the College of the Bahamas, has been fishing, cleaning and eating conch since he was a kid on the neighbouring island of Abaco. His grandma taught him how to prepare it.
A few taps of a hammer between the horns on the top of the shell and the conch slides out in all its horror-movie glory.
The secret to tender conch, he says as he trims the animal, is to slice the palm-sized centre meat down the middle. Cut it crosswise and you get a tough mess.
He dices it to make a ceviche-like conch salad dressed with liberal squeezes of lime and orange.
Davis also slices it into thin pieces for fritters, or pounds it with a mallet before breading it in egg wash and flour, deep frying it for a conch burger. Most of the 30 onsite eateries at the resort and its sister properties have at least one conch dish on their menus, reflecting the impressive creativity of chefs with the ultra-local ingredient.
Also in Bahamas, Conch-Oyaki at Katsuya by Starck offers a playful take on deep-fried conch, which serves it in a coconut shell and tops with not-too-sweet coconut foam. The arancini at Italian restaurant Fi’lia by Michael Schwartz swaps some of the arborio rice for minced conch. Elegant Chinese restaurant Shuang Ba serves its own take on deep-fried conch fritters, while casual Stix Noodle Bar serves congee with conch.
After attending Stratford Chefs School, Mozo opened French bistro Delux with Coelho on Ossington Avenue, the year after they moved to Toronto in 2006. One of the pioneers of the Ossington strip restaurant revival, the bistro, which was largely French-influenced, but had a cult-like following for its Cuban brunch, closed in 2014.
“I wish I’d done the Cuban thing right away,” she says.
The more relaxed, family-friendly vibe of La Cubana is just the kind of restaurant the mother of two teenage girls wanted to run; comfort food drawn from her roots, along with rum-based cocktails.
The menus are printed diner-style on the paper placemats, and the custom floor mosaics, illuminated signs, black sacks of Cubita coffee and pale green tiled walls are true to the design of diners in Cuba.
Mozo is always pleased to see Cubans enjoying her food. Her only regret is she never learned to speak Spanish.
“That’s the thing that really bothers me,” she says. “I own a Cuban restaurant and there are a lot of Cubans that come here and I really wish I could have a decent conversation with them.”
La Cubana
392 Roncesvalles Ave., 92 Ossington Ave., 1030 Gerrard St. East, Toronto, Ont.
lacubana.ca | 416.538.7500 | @lacubana_to
