Café Habana Goes West

Café Habana in NYC 's Nolita neighborhood is one of the most popular Cuban-Mexican restaurants around, with a perpetual thirty minute wait for a table. The corn alone is worth a visit (to make your own, roll an ear in chili powder, cotija cheese, and lime and throw it on the grill), but so far it has only been available to people in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Now, though, the restaurant is making a leap across the country to two new locations in Venice and Malibu - which will instantly double their number of restaurants. Café Habana has a sustainable way of running the current restaurants, especially evident in the Brooklyn Outpost (read more about their enviromentally friendly practices here: http://www.cafehabana.com/planet.htm), so I was not surprised to see them opening a restaurant in Malibu's Lumberyard, a 'green' shopping center that, incidentally, includes many of the same shops found in Nolita and Soho back East. Looks like Habana will fit right in...