Former patrons are trying to keep one of Plant City’s legendary eateries alive with a new downtown shop.
Home can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For Scott Snapp, home was often a quick run from the airport to grab a Cuban at Norma’s Ybor City Cuban Sandwich Shop after one of his frequent business trips.
He made that run for the last time the day Norma’s closed suddenly and without warning in March. Snapp, a lifelong Plant City resident, was devastated, but unwilling to lose his home. He opened Norma’s Plant City Cuban Sandwich Shop with son-in-law Leo Mesquita Nov. 18, but not before the former Norma’s owner, Candace Haywood, showed the owners and kitchen manager Andy Nassar her storied preparations for the iconic Tampa sandwich and sides that made her shop a Plant City institution. They even use the same bread, which is where it all starts, Snapp said.
“I’m a native of Plant City. I’ve lived there all my life. I love my little town, but I’m not there very much because of my travel schedule,” Snapp said. “I’m in the catastrophe business (Snapp has worked with Progressive Insurance responding to natural disasters for nearly 29 years). My job is stressful. For me to be able to come home and get that taste of home meant the world to me.”
The name might be slightly different, but the food is mostly the same.
“I didn’t realize how much I actually missed their Cubans until I just had one,” Susan Venning said on her first visit to the new Norma’s.
Keeping the familial atmosphere and familiar tastes was one of the main priorities in opening the shop, Mesquita said. It was all about
keeping the tradition established by Haywood and her family alive.
“We wanted to keep the Norma’s name and the recipes,” Mesquita said. “Candy has been extremely nice and blessed us and this idea. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her teaching us in the kitchen.”
The first month has been more successful than either Mesquita or Snapp thought it’d be. They still haven’t had their grand opening, which is slated to happen in January. The family got to work on the shop, located on Collins Street in Plant City’s Historic Downtown district, in August, while Mesquita was preparing for his wedding. He got back from his honeymoon just days before the soft opening.
“It’s not what we expected in the first month,” Mesquita said. “We’ve had very good customers and a lot of loyal customers from the old shop.”
In July, Mesquita was working a corporate job for Florida Power & Light in West Palm Beach. The 27-year-old University of Central Florida graduate had been with the company for a few years. He flirted with entrepreneurship through a now-defunct apparel company he had on the side, but wanted something of his own. Snapp wanted to keep his love for a good Cuban alive and decided to help his soon-to-be son-in-law achieve a goal. Within a month, Mesquita had quit his job, moved to Plant City and enlisted the help of Nassar, a chef friend he knew from high school.
For Snapp, a good Cuban is more than a sandwich. It’s home. It’s family.
“Ever since I was a kid, my father made a big deal out of a genuine Cuban Sandwich and how wonderful that was.”
Trips with his father into Tampa for the kind of authentic Cuban he says you can only find in the Bay Area grew into trips to Norma’s, where his own children grew up eating Cubans at the counter.
“It’s about the connection to our hometown,” he said. “The familial connection.”
The downtown location puts the shop, which has so much of
Snapp’s heart in it, into the heart of Plant City’s burgeoning downtown core. The decor has changed, as well as a few modern updates like online ordering and accepting debit and credit transactions, but the food and the feelings, Snapp hopes, have remained the same.
“This is a testament of love for two things: the traditional Tampa Cuban Sandwich and that people of Plant City have a love for their local eateries,” Snapp said. “Being able to come home and just be home and get that taste of home, that’s the reward, to be able to get that in my home town. It’s comforting to look across the table or bar and see someone who’s a regular and smile or chat. That’s what it’s all about."
