by Thomas MacMillan & Allan Appel | Mar 24, 2011 12:00 pm

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Posted to: Business/ Economic Development, Food, Downtown

If Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro were to meet up in a New Haven tavern in 2011, they’d probably end up in a new rum-lovers’ Cuban joint on Orange Street. Meanwhile, home-brewers and craft buyers now have a “beer culture” spot for sampling distinctive ales on Crown Street—where the lights stay low enough to prevent “skunking.”

Next week Dominick Splendorio will start serving arepas along with an endless variety of rums at his new Cuban restaurant and bar called Zafra, next door to the recently shuttered Christy’s Irish Pub on Orange. The specialty beer has already started flowing at Crown Street’s “Cask Republic.”

On Tuesday, Splendorio was overseeing the installation of recessed lighting behind the sparkly blue bar at his new space. Two bundles of 4-foot sugar cane stalks—fresh from the Dominican Republic—stood in the corner. A new $1,800 sugar cane press—fresh from Miami—sat on a table. On a wall calendar made by Splendorio’s young daughter, “Soft Opening” was penciled in for Monday, March 28.

The restaurant, named Zafra, will be Splendorio’s third food venture in New Haven. He owns Cafe Java coffee shop across the street and La Granja Mexican restaurant next door to Irish pub Anna Liffey’s on Whitney Avenue.

Zafra also enjoys a pub as a neighbor, Christy’s at 261 Orange St. But the bar has been closed since early this month with tax trouble. Splendorio said he’s “bummed” about that, as he had counted on Christy’s to bring people to the area.

Christy’s was shut down by bankruptcy court a few weeks ago after ongoing trouble with unpaid state and federal taxes. The building’s owner said he’s not sure if the bar will reopen; Christy’s owner Christopher Mulhall couldn’t be reached for comment.

On Tuesday afternoon, Splendorio, who’s 42, laid out his plans for Zafra. The restaurant will be centered on rum, with over 100 types of rum on offer and rum “used as a cooking basis” for the menu, he said. Zafra’s selection of scores of rums will include some high-end “sipping rums” that will go for as much as $50 per glass, Splendorio said. He’ll also offer “flights” of rum samples, and a “rum of the month.”

Splendorio said he’ll have bottled Caribbean beers, “sangria, sangria, sangria,” and of course, mojitos.

The minty Cuban cocktail will be made at Zafra with fresh-pressed cane juice, called “guarapo,” Splendorio said. He’s arranged for weekly stalk shipments from the Dominican Republic.

“The flavor of the pure cane juice is so unique,” Splendorio said. “It’s very addictive.”

The previous tenant at Splendorio’s location was a Korean restaurant. The space has been empty for over a year. Splendorio said he gutted the space and built it up again. He’s aiming to create an intimate, dimly lit atmosphere for dates. Entrees will go for $10 to $21 a plate.

“It’s going to be kind of a night-out place,” he said.

Splendorio acknowledged that the bar will be a new challenge after his lunch restaurant and coffee shop.“It’s very exciting. It’s my first bar,” he said.

For Splendorio, whose mom is Cuban, it’s a move toward his roots. “It’s my two loves together. I love rum and Cuban food.”

Splendorio said he is “absolutely confident” his restaurant will be a success. “I couldn’t be more confident.” He did acknowledge that the closing of Christy’s will be a challenge. “[The owner’s] success gave me a lot of confidence in this location.”

“He drew a lot of people on Friday and Saturday nights down here. That draw is going to be missing from the block.”

Nevertheless, Splendorio (pictured) said, he’s so sure of his investment that he purchased the space; he’s not just leasing the location.

As he spoke, local celebrity chef Neil Fuentes emerged from the kitchen with a freshly made arepa, a cornmeal cake covered with “ropa vieja” beef cooked with sofrito and topped with cheese. Fuentes is helping Splendorio to finalize the menu.

That menu, according to Splendorio, will include rum-glazed shrimp skewers, tostones rellana (a “plantain cup” filled with shrimp creole), “Cuban dumplings” with a Malibu rum dipping sauce, coconut-crusted tilapia, guava glazed salmon, and Argentinian flank steak.

Splendorio took a bite of Fuentes’ arepa and pronounced it delicious.

Shmully Hecht, who owns the building occupied by Christy’s, said on Tuesday that it remains to be seen if or when the bar will reopen.

“We’re looking at different options,” he said. He said he hopes to have an answer on the question of re-opening by next week. The building is for sale. It’s been for sale since Hecht’s company, Pike International, bought it five months ago, he said. The company has plans to renovate the upstairs, but is also open to selling it, Hecht said.

“Beer Culture” Finds A Home

Meanwhille, on Crown Street, Cask Republic has turned on the tap. A whole lot of taps, actually.

Jerry Trejo (pictured) is a third-year medical student at Yale who says you can have three alcoholic beverages a day without causing liver damage. True to his word, the future urologist was sipping his second, a Lindeman’s Cassis Black Currant from Belgium ($14 for the pint).

That is one of 53 beers available on tap—count ‘em—at Cask Republic, the new tavern on Crown Street that’s aspiring to establish itself as the center of “beer culture” in New Haven.

The two-month old restaurant is doing “fantastic,” according to one of the managers Andrew Hoenig, who said New Haven already has what he termed an educated beer culture.

The clientele include not only Yale students and employees, both drunken and sophisticated, he said, but also 40- to 60-year-old home-brewers and craft brewers from as far away as Norwalk and Trumbull.

Cask Republic is the brainchild of Christian Burns who helped pioneer the Ginger Man restaurant in Norwalk, on which model Cask Republic is built.

The essential idea is that beer is treated with the same seriousness as wine.

In that spirit, Hoenig showed a reporter facilities that were built into the former Landsdowne Tavern that today are unique in New Haven. They include this keg room, where 48 beers are kept at precisely 37 or 38 degrees and are piped into the bar to be tapped at that temperature.

“Belgian and Imperial stouts with higher alcoholic content” preserve their taste when they’re delivered at a higher temperature, he added. So they have their own transport system that delivers them to patrons at the bar at 52 degrees.

The types of beer are continually changing so that during the course of the two months the restaurant has been open, the adventurous beer masters have cycled through anywhere from 150 to 200 different brews from around the world.

“Beer ages well but doesn’t like light, ” said Matt Bacco, the other beer manager at Cask Republic. When you taste that stale, turned quality of beer, he said, it has usually been “skunked” by the light.

So the restaurant has subdued lighting and, for a beer haven, a low key atmosphere with a kind of aggressive hum. It’s as if you can hear the yeast, beer’s essential activating ingredient, doing its work all around you.

Not only are barrels aging on the premises but bottles too, so the restaurant has what operators term a vintage room. Here, brews like Imperial Stout Trooper fashioned at the nearby New England Brewery in Woodbridge, await at about 57 degrees. It may take weeks or months at a time before drinker meets bottle. No matter. It will cost about $20 to enjoy a bottle; the local brewery makes only a highly limited run.

Limited runs are a big deal in beer culture. As are pairings of the right beer with the right food.

On Tuesday night a Trappistes Rochefort 6, also from a Belgium and made by the same monks who do the great preserves, was served with arctic char.

There was also a rib eye steak that had been marinated for five hours in Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary Grand Cru, and then served with that amber brew.

Bacco and Christian Burns explained that not only are the guys at Sierra Nevada in Chico, California, making a remarkable collection of beers; they are also nearly “off the grid.”

Displaying the enthusiasm and knowledge of arcana of any oenophile, Bacco praised the power of yeast, the perfection of the barley grain, and the idiosyncrasies of some brewers.

He said that the “off the grid” brewers of Sierra Nevada have a parking lot arrayed with solar panels; they also grow their own hops and barley and have their own water and yeast supplies, the four essential ingredients of beer.

In the case of an apocalypse and a failure of the power system, there will always be Sierra Nevada beer.

But Bacco, Burns, Hoenig, and company are by no means beer exotics or snobs. Bacco’s regular beer of choice is the democratic Rolling Rock. He was full of praise for the makers of Budweiser who produce 16 and a half bottles of that iconic American brew per second.

“Consistency is a sign of mastery,” is the way Bacco put it.

Cask Republic has established itself on Crown because of its proximity to Yale and the about-to-open Gateway Community College downtown campus. Also, the owners call New Haven a sophisticated town, beerwise.

“Our philosophy is that New Haven is large, it’s a beer-drinking town,” and there’s room for other establishments, Bacco said. “It’s cheap, it’s easy, it’s every man’s beverage, and every culture has beer,” Bacco said.

He cited Bar and Prime 16 and Delaney’s in Westville as places where beer is also appreciated. “We want a bigger beer community,” he said.