I first met Emanuel “Manny” Pérez-Ochoa and his sister, Ana Acela Pérez, in 2021, when their family opened El Puro. They transformed a former steakhouse in Madison Park into a Cuban restaurant reminiscent of pre-revolutionary Havana, before Castro stripped it of glamour. Their family already owned Havana Carolina Restaurant & Bar in Concord, but they saw an opportunity for another Cuban restaurant closer to the city center. The stretch of South Boulevard between Woodlawn and Arrowood roads was an emerging hub for authentic food from all over Latin America, including Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela.
“We liked south Charlotte—the traffic and community that lives toward this side of town is different,” Manny says. “They’re used to going out and eating every day. In Concord, they don’t have a lot of Latin food close by.”
Two years later, along with Manny’s Colombian wife, Carolina, they opened Muraya, a Colombian-inspired lounge in South End. Their newest venture, Babaloo Coffee Club, which opened in South End in January, serves La Colombe coffee, empanadas, and Cuban sandwiches and pastries. In the current political climate, they say it’s more important than ever to spread their culture throughout the Carolinas.
Babaloo’s Freddo Cappuccino
They’re too young to remember Charlotte in the ’90s—Manny is 26 and Ana is 24—but they know they’re building on a cultural shift that began just a few decades ago. When Bank of America moved its headquarters to Charlotte in 1992, the city didn’t have enough local blue-collar workers to build the uptown skyscraper, so they recruited construction workers from Texas. News of the worker shortage spread throughout the Latino community—on both sides of the border—and local immigration rates surged. Between 2010 and 2019, Charlotte’s Latino population grew by 36%, more than twice as fast as the overall population (15.4%), according to UNC Charlotte Urban Institute.
Today, Latinos are still the city’s fastest-growing demographic. It’s created an opening for more Latino-owned businesses like the Pérez-Ochoas’. But introducing Cuban culture to a Southern city took some time, even in 2021. “When you’re the first person to bring something new, when there’s nothing else like it, it’s hard to say, ‘This is how we eat and drink,’” Ana says. “When we first opened (El Puro), there wasn’t as much going on around here, so a lot of people would just come here for the music. Now more people know, but at the beginning, it was hard. Latino culture is usually associated with cheap food. Italian, French are more elevated. But our food and culture can be elevated, too.”
The Colombian Sliders come with sweet and savory dipping sauces at Muraya.
The Colombian menu at Muraya didn’t immediately resonate, either. They hired a chef from Carolina’s hometown to make traditional dishes. “That’s a mistake we made in the beginning,” Manny says. “Now, Muraya is Cartagena-inspired. It might be too greasy if we serve it the way they have it in Colombia … and there are certain ingredients we just can’t get here. We use local ingredients from local farms, but we’re still learning new trends in the industry.”
At Babaloo Coffee Club, the menu is a mix of Cuban and Colombian flavors, and customers have been quicker to understand it. It helps that the Pérez-Ochoas have more name recognition now, but they suspect the city’s appetite for Latin cuisine has expanded, too. And not just in the restaurant industry. As of 2024, Charlotte was home to more than 8,000 Latino-owned businesses.
“In Cuba, ‘babaloo’ is the energy that heals,” Manny says. “If you ask anyone in Cuba, they know what we’re talking about. If we can bring a piece of our culture, with the music, food, and drinks, then I think we’re doing something good for the community.”