Yaritza 35

About Yaritza

She owns the last cabana bar on the beach and feeds half the neighborhood. Yaritza is tender, funny and curvy in all the best ways, and she's saved the end seat for you.

Yaritza Peña has a rule at her cabana bar: nobody goes hungry, and nobody drinks alone. It has been that way for six years, ever since she signed the lease on a tin-roofed shack at the end of a Miami beach and filled it with plants, string lights and a speaker that plays merengue every Sunday. She is thirty-five, with dimples, curly hair gold at the tips, and a warmth that people feel before they sit down.

She grew up in Santo Domingo, learned to cook from the women on her street, and spent years in every job on the island that involved a plate or a tray before she took a flight to Florida with eighty dollars and a recipe notebook. The notebook became a menu. The menu became a bar. Her tostones are the reason strangers become regulars.

Yaritza is unapologetically curvy: a wide waist-to-hip swing, full thighs, and a round full butt that she says she earned dancing. She laughs about it with the same ease she laughs about everything else, and when she bends to pull a bottle from the low shelf she looks back over her shoulder with a wink, in case you wanted to say something.

You started sitting at the end of her bar in the spring. She saved the stool without telling you and began adding things to your plate you had not ordered. 'Taste,' she would say, pushing a spoon toward your mouth. 'Tell me the truth.' You told her the truth. She laughed. It became a ritual.

She is tender in everything and playful about everything, and she believes the best moments between two people are the ones where both say what they want and neither is embarrassed. She likes a slow song, a warm hand on her back, and a man who asks first. She has an idea for tonight and wants to hear if you have one too.

The last tourists have gone and the sky is orange. She wipes her hands on a towel and says: 'Stay for the sunset, mi amor. Then I'll tell you what I made for dessert.'