“La vida es una fiesta!”
Painted in big, bold, Spanish script in a stairwell at Ceniza, these words welcome patrons to a destination unlike any other in the Chattanooga area.
Beneath those words, the English translation clears things up for monolinguists: “Life is a party.”
If life is a party, then Ceniza is aiming to kick things up a notch.
Located in Ooltewah, Ceniza is not just a restaurant, Chef Andrew Platt says. It’s not just a bar, either, or merely a cigar lounge. Rather, it’s all three rolled into a single destination.
Platt climbs past the restaurant’s motto and up to the second floor, where cigar aficionados come to escape the rigors of everyday life and enjoy a quality smoke.
“Welcome to the underworld,” he says.
Downstairs, Platt’s servers are preparing to serve dinner, but the hustle and bustle can’t be heard in the glass-sealed sanctuary.
With only two gentleman sitting at the bar, the lounge is quiet. Late afternoon sunlight is pouring in through large windows and hitting a Caribbean-inspired mosaic built into one wall. Comfortable-looking seating fills the large space and a pair of pool tables stand ready for a friendly game. Oddly, the air holds only a hint of tobacco.
The atmosphere is both rustic and elegant, and defies the traditional notion that a cigar lounge should have dingy lighting, old leather couches and a thick cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling.
“When most people think of cigars, they picture an angry old man sitting at a bar,” Platt says. “But when you really get into cigars, you learn about their subtleties. They’re not all like the cheap ones your grandfather smoked that stunk up the house.”
Platt walks around a corner and opens the door to a small room filled with dozens of cigar boxes neatly placed on slanted wooden shelves. The lids are lifted to show off hundreds of tightly rolled stacks. This is the humidor, which keeps the cigars fresh.
“We rotate the stock depending on the season or based on what’s new or hot,” Platt says. “We sometimes get an early release that’s not sold anywhere else.”
One such release was the E.P. Carrillo Original Rebel. Platt says it made his nose hairs curl. “It’s an amazing smoke,” he says in a hushed church voice.
For newcomers who aren’t ready for a pepper bomb to the face, Ceniza offers products for beginners. “They’re a nice way of easing into cigars,” he says. “If you’re not a big wine drinker, you’re not going to tackle an expensive Capa cab that’s been aged forever. It’s the same thing with a cigar. You’re not going to smoke a hundred dollar stick right off the bat because you won’t appreciate it.”
Paul Dominguez, Ceniza’s cigar educator, enters the humidor, looking for something to light.
Dressed in a red velvet smoking jacket, matching bowtie and black Derby, and sporting a thick grey goatee and handlebar moustache, Dominguez looks like he should have a cigar in his hand.
A Boys and Girls Club veteran, Dominguez spends his evenings helping Ceniza’s customers find the perfect smoke.
“I ask them questions. I learn about their cigar experience and what they’re looking for as far as taste,” he says as he plucks an Guillermo Leon from its box.
It’s a job Dominguez, who’s been smoking cigars for 50 years, loves.
“The most stress I have is finishing one cigar and deciding what I’m going to smoke next,” he says. Having stepped outside the humidor, he lights the Guillermo Leon with a match, takes a long, slow draw and then releases a plume of white smoke from his lips.
“We let people smoke cigars and pipes in the lounge. If you want to smoke anything else, you have to step outside,” he says, nodding toward a door that leads to a large patio.
Dominguez is part of an effort at Ceniza to offer a cigar experience rather than a conventional lounge. A vital part of that effort are the cigar events, which take place on the third Thursday of every month. Called “Cigar, Spirits and Savories,” Platt doesn’t simply pair a drink with a cigar; he brings together a select smoke, a custom designed drink by mixologist Danny Valdez and hors d’oeuvres that complement the nuances of the other items.
More often than not, Platt involves the selected cigar in the preparation of the culinary component. For example, he might extract the flavor from its wrapper or leaves by steeping them like tea, or make a compote from the filler.
For the first event, Platt prepared a braised oxtail cooked in loose leaf tobacco and made a sauce using the wrappers of the cigar. Together, these processes infused the complexities of the entire cigar in the food.
“Smoking and eating at the same time is considered a faux pas,” Platt says. “I want to show people there’s life beyond the ideologies of your parents and grandparents. The cigar is transformed when you cook it and eat it.”
La vida es una fiesta!
The party is just getting started downstairs, where Platt’s culinary artistry is given free rein.
Ceniza’s menu offers a fusion of Caribbean cuisine and Southern favorites. One of the restaurant’s biggest sellers is Platt’s CFC and Mac – a plateful of chicken fried in a coconut batter and served with roasted red pepper mac and cheese and sautéed vegetables.
The dish is meant to transport diners to another part of the world while offering them the comfort of home. “It has the essence of the piña colada, which everyone drinks when they go on vacation, blended with southern fried chicken,” Platt says.
Like a jazz musician improvising notes on stage, Platt likes to play with food and see where it takes him. If he has a signature rift, it’s pairing foods that traditionally don’t go well together to create unexpected flavors. His Caribbean Ribeye is one example. Marinated in a Cuban coffee lime rub, it has nuances of sweet, sour, savory, bitter and spicy.
“Coffee is dark and sweet, which is a little dull, so I added a bit of black pepper. The marinade was still missing something, though, so I added an acid,” Platt says. “Then I tweaked it to create a harmonious balance.”
Platt says his unorthodox cooking techniques result in dishes that are both familiar and surprising. “People will say, ‘I’ve had this before, but not like this,’” he says.
Platt rarely lets his mind rest. This is good news for diners with a fondness for adventure, who on Fridays and Saturdays can order all-new weekly specials. For one upcoming dish, Platt promises to transform Ahi tuna using a soursop vinaigrette made from guanabana, a pulpy Spanish fruit.
“I love to give people something familiar but with a new spin,” he says.
Platt was born and raised in Miami, Florida. He says his mother was Cuban and his father was redneck, making him “a combination of fried chicken and frijoles negros.”
Platt took a liking to food at a young age. When his kindergarten teacher asked her students to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up, Platt sketched a man with a chef’s hat and a knife.
“My mother could cook but she wasn’t a great cook,” he says. “There was just something about food that drew me in.”
Platt began taking cooking classes at Johnson & Wales University at age eight. By sixth grade, he’d talked his way into working at a restaurant down the road from where he lived with his mother and two siblings.
From there, Platt’s passion has grown with each passing year. “I love what I do,” he says. “I enjoy every aspect of it. I even love the numbers, challenge and stress.”
At 29, Platt sometimes finds himself defending his experience. But with 17 years of work in the food industry, he says his youth is irrelevant. “If you’re good at what you do, your age doesn’t matter,” he says.
Ceniza owners Danny and Brittany Alcala must agree, as they’ve given Platt’s imagination permission to run wild. His most recent invention was brunch on Sundays, during which Ceniza offers dishes not available during the other days of the week.
From cigars, to spirits, to food, every element of Ceniza was designed with the guest experience in mind. As the Alcalas were birthing their vision for the restaurant early this year, they didn’t want to build another place to smoke, drink or eat; they wanted to create a destination that combines all three into a single exhilarating experience.
The words painted in big, bold Spanish script in a stairwell leading to the cigar lounge bear testimony to their vision. Life is a party, they say, and it should be experienced. With Dominguez upstairs, Platt downstairs and Valdez working his magic behind the bars, the crew at Ceniza is doing everything it can to help people do just that.