FOOD & DR INK
because Nelson was working full time, and I had a six-month-old baby.” The bustaurant took up residency in a friend’s space at Quy Waters while Nelson worked on the restoration and Catalina handled the paperwork and permissions, playing to their individual strengths to move the project forward. “He was in charge of the transformation of the bus, and I was in charge of all the documentation, the admin that he didn’t want to know anything about. I don’t have any clue how to do handy things – so it worked!” she says. At the same time as the bus was taking shape, the menu was being whittled down from the world of possibilities presented by Catalina and Nelson’s heritage to just three dishes: tostones, arepas and empanadas. The short menu was partly a necessity, caused by the shortage of space in the bus: “It’s impossible to have a huge menu in a tiny kitchen and still make everything fresh every single day,” Catalina says, “so we needed to focus on two or three things that we can do from scratch easily without wasting food. So we decided to do the empanadas, the arepas and the tostones: that’s it.” Even though the trio definitely deserves its place on the menu (and in many local diners’ hearts), Catalina is constantly searching for ways to improve La Latina’s offering. “I would always remember my mum and granny’s words – you need something that makes you unique, but even if you have a good product, every time you have to think about how to improve. So our tostones are very good, but every day I’m thinking ‘ok, this is good – but how can I make this better?’. I feel my granny saying this to me here, you know?” she grins, pointing at her
shoulders. “The tostones have been a revelation: the empanadas and the arepas are popular: people know them – but the tostones are our bestseller, definitely.” La Latina is also popular with diners with dietary requirements: Catalina explains that their vegetarian tostones are selling more and more every day, and as the bustaurant’s food is entirely gluten free, Cambridge’s residents with wheat intolerances are starting to make beelines for La Latina’s fresh, vibrant cooking. “We only use corn flour for the arepas and empanadas, and the plantain is gluten free anyway – so we have coeliac people come in and say: ‘This is paradise!’” On its first outings the bustaurant moved around to different locations, with customers keeping up on social media, but Catalina wanted to find a permanent pitch for La Latina to call home. “I found a location with the Cambridge Retail Park: I approached them about the space, but it took four months – they had to ask the city council to change the licence – so we missed that first summer. We’ve now been trading here since October 2017 and it’s getting better: people know where we are, we have free parking, it’s close for us as well – obviously we pay rent, but the good thing is that the bus stays here, permanently.” Their bus, now the only independent business trading on the Retail Park, is nestled to the side of Homebase just off the Beehive roundabout, where its cheery top deck can easily be spotted through the trees that soften the superstores. An average day for the couple begins at 6.30am, when Catalina wakes up for a few moments of time alone with her coffee. She takes her sister to the station, to commute to her studies in London –
then returns to the house to wake and breakfast with their two children before the school run. “Between 9am and 10am I do the emails and admin, while Nelson is busy with his chili plants in our greenhouse. At ten o’clock we arrive at La Latina: we open at midday, and have two rush hours: one for lunch and then again for dinner, but we don’t close between – we stay open from 12 until 9pm. At 3pm I leave to get the kids; sometimes Nelson goes – I pick up the kids and at 4pm our other staff member arrives, and they’ll work with Nelson or me here for the evening. We close at 9pm: if I’m with the kids at home, I put them to bed while my sister arrives back from London – she then stays with the kids, while I come back here to help Nelson close down the kitchen, getting everything ready. We go back home about 10pm, have a cup of tea, go to bed about 11pm… and then do it all over again the next day!” In between, Catalina strives to find time for her own interests. “I always want to have a book to read: I try to be a good daughter, sister, niece – life is getting very busy. Plus all my kids’ after school activities: swimming, piano lessons, birthday parties. We don’t stop. I’m always thinking: what should I do next? Let’s do a new event, let’s do a supper club, let’s contact that person… we’re always on the move. Life is so short: you have to give thanks that for most of your days you are healthy, you work properly – it’s now or never. Because you never know. I always thank God because we have our healthy family, we have a house, we have food on our table – but you never know what’s going to happen.” La Latina is a family business in all senses of the term: whether it’s Catalina’s mother providing business advice via Skype, Nelson’s graffiti-artist cousin designing La Latina’s exterior paintwork or his parents helping upholster the bus in coffee sacks, their family is what powers the bus forward – both in terms of physical backup but also emotional support. In its first year of trading La
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