The members of the Leaf & Bean Cigar Club in a tobacco field on the Rocky Patel Plantation.
By Tim Urbanic
How’s this for a birthday present? My wife, Melody, intercepted an e-mail from the Leaf & Bean Cigar and Coffee Shop on the Strip, located in Pittsburgh. The e-mail was an invitation to travel to Honduras to the Rocky Patel Cigar Factories. While traveling to Central America is probably something I would never think of doing on my own, going with a group led by someone who’s been there several times and plans trips as a regular part of his job somehow made me feel comfortable with signing on. I celebrated my birthday with a bunch of guys I had never met before with whom I had two things in common: an affinity for fine cigars and a sense of adventure.
The trip was limited to 10 people and filled up quickly, creating what would become known as the Leaf & Bean Cigar Club. What a crew we were: a merchant marine, an environmental technician, a retired Pennsylvania state policeman, a chamber of commerce president, a photographer, a Presbyterian minister, an entrepreneur, a couple of retired businessmen, the owner of Leaf & Bean and myself, the chef of Café Cimino Country Inn.
We flew out of Pittsburgh and landed in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, around three in the afternoon. We were met at the airport by a passenger van provided by Rocky Patel Cigar Factories; our guide, Nimish; a humidor full of cigars and an ice chest of beer. We promptly departed for a three-hour drive to the interior of Honduras, which is just north of the Nicaraguan and Honduran border, to the town of Danli. Danli is the heart of tobacco plantations and cigar factories.
The drive alone was an adventure. The roads were anything from paved two lanes to single gravel lanes, and they wound through many tiny villages. The poverty was overwhelming, while the riches were extravagant. The scenery was spectacular, and there were many panoramic views from the tops of the mountains. Transportation varied from walking to riding a horse, donkey, bicycle or motorcycle, and all of these methods of transportation shared the road with cars, vans and small trucks. The people were beautiful with their dark complexions and bright smiles. All with an inherent connection to the earth, they were subsistence farmers, working the fields by hand or with oxen or tractors.
Danli, by comparison to the small villages we passed along the way, showed a great deal of prosperity, which can be attributed to the cigar industry. The whole economy in this region of Honduras is attached to the cigar industry in one way or another, from the growing and farming of the tobacco crop, the curing of the leaves and manufacturing of the cigars to the exporting. The rest of the economy acts as a support system providing goods and services to those involved in the tobacco industry.
Our destination was a walled villa in the town of Paraiso. The beautiful villa, owned by Rocky Patel, had a courtyard with gardens, fountains and a swimming pool. Our guest rooms surrounded the courtyard but were very simple and utilitarian, and the villa housed an enormous humidor with many choices of Rocky Patel cigars freely available to us, as well as all the beer and rum we could drink.
We awoke the next morning for our first day of “Cigar Making 101,” which took place in one of Rocky Patel’s factories in Paraiso. The factory was surrounded by high razor-wired fences with armed security guards everywhere. This is typical in Honduras, as business owners protect their properties with their own private security guards. All of the cigar club members had security escorts at all times. At this first factory tour, we had chalkboard lectures on where the best leaves come from as well as the basis of curing, aging and hand-rolling.
This company alone employs 9,000 workers, which is basically everyone in the area. The workers make about $10 a day, and they seem to manage well on this salary. The images from this factory that stand out to me were of the thousands of bicycles, scooters and small motorcycles that filled the employee parking lots. Cars were scarce, as only supervisors and managers had them.
After a full day at the Paraiso Cigar Factory, we retired to our villa to play dominos, drink rum and enjoy another great homemade dinner prepared by the cooks: a burrito buffet, where they grilled meats and vegetables and we built our own burritos.
The next morning, we traveled deeper into the farmland to the Rocky Patel tobacco plantations where we got to see tobacco growing in several different stages: the seed, the finished leaf, the harvesting of the leaves and the cure barns. What makes these Central American cigars so great is that they are authentic Cuban seeds rolled by Cuban mentors who settled in Honduras after the Cuban revolution and Castro’s takeover.
After touring the tobacco plantation, we went even further into the mountains to see a coffee plantation. It was during the coffee tour that the security guards got wind of the fact that I am an Italian chef, and they began plotting for me to prepare an Italian spaghetti dinner that evening for our group of 30 people.
On the way back to the villa, the guards took us to markets and little grocery shops to gather ingredients for my big Italian dinner. Boy, was this a challenge! I ended up with enough lettuce and vegetables for a salad. I made a dressing from some vodka and olive oil we were able to find along the way. I made a Bolognese sauce out of freshly ground meats and chorizo sausage, which I served over the limited pasta we could find in the local stores. I also cut up fresh fruits and soaked them in a vodka and Cuban sugar marinade. Needless to say, I scored big as everyone loved the change in cuisine.
While being able to choose our favorite tobacco leaves and wrappers and create our own cigar brands—mine is available at Café Cimino’s Little Dishes—was a real bonus of the trip, the true highlight was that all 10 of us were able to get along so well regardless of our religious or political beliefs. That’s what smoking a good cigar among friends is about: putting away differences to bask in the pleasure of finely rolled tobacco.
Photography by Tim Urbanic
1 Comment
A delightful read;well written. Thanks for sharing.