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No more mountain of fries: COVID is closing this beloved Westchester Cuban restaurant

Río Cristal Cuban restaurant built its fame atop a mountain of French fries.

For 46 years, its faithful followers kept coming back to a strip mall in Westchester, where the late Pepe Acosta buried a thin, tender Palomilla steak beneath a buttress of hot, crispy French fries — a tropical steak frites.

The restaurant outlasted his passing in 2014, but it could not outpace COVID-19.

Río Cristal will close Aug. 31, unable to sustain business with only takeout and delivery as interior dining rooms remain closed to control the spread of the coronavirus, the founder’s daughter said. The blogger Sef Gonzalez was the first to write about its closing.

“It’s sad. This restaurant was here before I was born,” Ely Acosta told the Miami Herald. “It was home for me.”

Pepe Acosta’s restaurant was home, too, for the Cuban and Cuban-American crowd, who left Little Havana and the heart of Miami for the wider suburbs in the 1970s.

His first restaurant, Lila’s, was a hit in the heart of Little Havana, a transplant of a location he opened with family in New York. But Acosta sold the restaurant to travel and see the world.

Apparently, he’d seen enough of it by 1974 when he decided to return to the restaurant business. Acosta had sold the name Lila’s to another family, so he named his new endeavor for a beautiful restaurant by the same name that he remembered from his youth in the Cuban city of Güines.

He ran Río Cristal with his oldest son, Jose Manuel, with two truisms, his daughter Ely said: Make flavorful, affordable food and never get into debt.

He succeeded at both. The restaurant served all manner of traditional Cuban dishes and sandwiches. But it was the steak piled high with French fries, for about $13, that spawned a following.

“He loved fries. He loved steak. And he said, ‘Why not cover it?’” Ely Acosta said. “He loved the taste. It caught on, and people loved it.”

When Pepe Acosta began feeling the effects of congestive heart failure, his second wife Teresita stepped in to run the restaurant with Jose Manuel. Ely saw a side of her they never had when she was a housewife. Even after Pepe died at age 91, the restaurant flourished.

But staying open was impossible during the pandemic, Ely Acosta said.

When restaurants were first ordered closed in March, Río Cristal subsisted on takeout and saw some light when dining rooms were allowed to reopen in late May. They received a federal payment-protection loan that allowed them to pay employees to work or stay home.

But, Acosta said, when daily COVID-19 cases spiked to some of the highest in the country, Miami-Dade County ordered interior dining rooms closed to control the spread. Outside seating was allowed, but Río Cristal’s owners could not afford to outfit their searing blacktop parking lot to make it livable for diners during Miami summers.

The restaurant’s landlord cut their rent for several months, but the family resisted taking on debt to stay in business, she said, following her father’s mandate.

“My dad was a big believer in never going into debt to run a business,” she said.

Acosta’s mother and brother, who work the restaurant, convinced her to join their decision to close the Río Cristal. Most of their employees have been with the restaurant since it opened, she said, and many are already retirement age. Others have started to look for work elsewhere.

Jose Manuel and his mother, who have made a living at the restaurant, told her they may one day reopen when the coronavirus pandemic passes. For now, Ely said she’s happy to have seen the family business leave its mark on South Florida.

“It makes me feel good,” she said, “that something my dad built has affected so many people’s lives.”

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