In Transit
The Miami Restaurant That’s Brought On Staff During the Pandemic
Owner David Garcia, of Little Havana’s La Camaronera, has kept his restaurant going at a brisk clip, with no staff infections, for now
Welcome to In Transit, a column from the writer Mayukh Sen focusing on how immigrant-owned restaurants across America are coping with the Covid-19 pandemic. Read previous installments here.
Before he was even a teenager, David Garcia got his first job at his family’s restaurant, La Camaronera Seafood Joint and Fish Market, in Miami’s Little Havana. It wasn’t exactly glamorous work. He spent that summer in the early 1990s peeling and deveining shrimp. “That would make you not want to be in the restaurant business,” Garcia recalled of that labor one day in late October. “It was horrific, man.”
Miraculously, the experience didn’t repel Garcia, now in his 40s, from restaurant work for good. He joined La Camaronera officially in 2007, continuing a rich legacy built by his father, Arsenio, and two uncles, Juan and Felix Ramon. The three had come to Miami as exiles from Cuba in 1964, when Arsenio was 23. Two years after their arrival, the men began a fish market and wholesaler, Garcia Brothers Seafood; in 1973, the trio invested…
