Sabores de Ybor

By Dayana Melendez

The first smell I ever connected with home was the scent of onions hitting hot oil. My mother cooked that way almost every day in our turquoise house in the heart of Tampa, a place that always felt full even when it was quiet. My dad would pass through the kitchen on his way to fix something, my brother would hover near the fridge, and I learned early to follow the rhythm of my mom’s cooking by sound. The sizzle meant she was beginning something, and that “something” was always delicious and Cuban.

I was seven when she first let me stand on a chair to reach the counter. The wooden spoon felt oversized in my hand as she taught me how to stir without splashing. “Despacio,” she said, slowly. Cooking was the first thing that taught me patience — and I was good at it. I took to cooking quickly, almost instinctively. The only time I recall really messing a dish up was my first ever attempt at making rice — once too salty, the redo too bland. My mother laughed, showed me how to measure with her old cafeteria cup, and after that I almost never got anything wrong. Cooking felt like a language I already knew, even though I was still learning the words.

By the time I turned eighteen, I thought I understood what Cuban food meant to me but moving to Miami that year untangled everything I believed. Miami wasn’t Tampa — It was its own universe, full of people who shared my culture in ways I hadn’t experienced growing up. They had the memories I didn’t: the island stories, the family histories tied to neighborhoods in Havana, the unmistakable sense of belonging that comes from remembering where you came from.

My parents and I had left Cuba just shy of my third birthday; I held no memories of the island. My connection to it lived in pots and pans, in the smells that drifted from my mother’s kitchen, in the way she talked about food like it was an inheritance. Throughout my early adulthood in Miami, cooking became my way of grounding myself. My first apartment barely held enough room for a full-size cutting board, but I cooked anyway: picadillo, arroz blanco, fried eggs over rice, black beans that simmered until they thickened. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone or recreate childhood memories. I was trying to find myself in a place where I suddenly felt incredibly Cuban yet strangely disconnected.

Miami shaped me in ways I didn’t expect. It made me feel more Cuban and less Cuban all at once. My Spanish sharpened, my sense of heritage deepened, but I also felt the gap between me and those who grew up immersed in the island’s rhythms. I realized then that my connection to Cuba was something I built through repetition and intention. My identity was something I had to cook into existence.

Years later, after my son was born, I moved back to Tampa. Coming home felt softer this time. Tampa had waited for me, unchanged in all the ways I needed, but I wasn’t the same girl who had grown up in that turquoise house. I had lived whole chapters elsewhere. I had become someone else and someone more but the first thing I did when I unpacked was cook.

My son, now eight, already has a relationship with the kitchen that reminds me of myself at his age. He knows the sound of onions hitting hot oil and can recognize picadillo by scent alone. His favorite thing that makes me feel the most full-circle — is pounding garlic in our wooden pilón or mortar and pestle as its better-known state side. He does it with such enthusiasm the same way I must have once done without thinking. “Did I do a good job?” he asks every time. The answer is always a profound yes.

Cooking those familiar dishes in my Tampa kitchen made me realize something: food isn’t just something that follows you, it is something that shapes who you are. The meals my mother taught me became the ones I now make for my son, small rituals that stitch our lives together across time, memories and cities. When he lifts the pilón and looks up at me waiting for approval, I hear echoes of my mother’s voice — steady, patient, certain.

Sometimes I think about how strange it is that I don’t remember Cuba, yet its flavors are the clearest part of my identity. I’ve lived nearly my entire life away from the island, but its food has shaped every chapter of who I am. Maybe inheritance doesn’t live in memory, perhaps it lives in motion — in the repetition of learned gestures, carried forward into a new place and future generations.

When I peel garlic now, I think about my mother’s hands moving confidently over the counter, the chaos of our turquoise house, the pot of rice I ruined, the pots I perfected later in Miami. I think about my son pressing garlic with a seriousness that makes me smile. And I think about how home has never been one place or one version of myself.

Home has always been the kitchen.

It is the one place that has carried me through every move, every chapter, every reinvention. And in the end, the food that followed me home isn’t just about Cuba or nostalgia or even tradition. It is about continuity. It is about grounding. It is about belonging.

It is the quiet truth that no matter where I go, I can always start again the moment the onions hit the pan.