Amigo’s Deli

Amigo’s deli is a short-order Latin-American diner, butcher shop, and grocery store. The butcher case is fascinating — chickens, sausages, cuts of meat rarely found in an ordinary supermarket — and the grocery shelves hold items that range from 50-pound bags of rice to root vegetables I could not identify. Straight ahead as you enter is the restaurant area. Here you can come for a simple breakfast sandwich or a BLT or a wide variety of Cuban and South American specialties that lace the air with savory perfume.

Available hot meals include gorgeous rotisserie chicken, spare ribs, roast pork in gravy, oxtail, and goat. The Cuban sandwich, made with freshly roasted pork, is the best around. If you sit at the counter, you can watch it assembled — a complicated process combining hunks of roasted pork, grill-heated ham and melted cheese, lettuce shreds, tomato slices, pickle chips, mustard, and mayo all piled into a long roll. The roll is buttered on the outside and placed in a makeshift plancha that weighs enough to compress the sandwich so that by the time it is cooked through, all the ingredients are nearly melded together. Once the sandwich man cuts it in two and presents it, this sandwich is a tidy package. And a most delicious one!