Published on March 30, 2026
“All that we have learned has been, as we Cubans say, ‘a golpe.’”
Amanda Melendez is explaining the success of her food truck in Kissimmee, Florida, and it’s quickly becoming clear that her popularity did not come : it was forged out of fire.
“A golpe” literally means “,” and when Melendez says she learned that way, she means that she did so through struggle or sheer force of will.
It would be easy to forget this while salivating over a plate of her cerdo asado, or roast pork, the meat falling apart under a gleaming sheet of crispy skin. Served over Cuban rice and beans with pickled onions, fried sweet plantains, and yuca, the knock-out dish makes customers feel at home. So too does the warm, graceful service from Melendez and Claudia Mena, her partner in life and business.
But behind Chef Amanda’s brilliant cooking and impeccable service are two women who have worked tirelessly to build their business from the ground up.
Melendez was born and raised in Matanzas, Cuba, in a family that cherished mealtime.
“Food, for us, was more than food,” she recalls. “It was the moment where we would sit together, where we would share our culture.”
Melendez’s grandmother Mirta would prepare delicious meals for her entire extended family: comfort dishes like carne frita, or fried meat, and macaroni with pork fill Melendez’s memories of childhood.
“We don’t have that much abundance in Cuba,” Melendez says, “and my grandmother would resolve to feed us with whatever she could get her hands on.” In this way, young Amanda was raised in a culture of culinary innovation.
“In Cuba, if something doesn’t exist, Cubans will invent it to feed their families,” Melendez says.
At age 18, Melendez left the island nation for Miami, where she joined her father, who was already living there.
At first, Amanda wasn’t particularly interested in cooking. As a child, she left the cooking to her grandmother.
In Miami, fate brought her just outside of the kitchen, as a server and a manager. “I worked, like we all do in this country, in gastronomy,” Melendez says. Her first job was in a Salvadorean restaurant, and her second was at a Cuban one. The experiences exposed her to cuisines from across Latin America—even her own.
“I ate foods that people here say are Cuban dishes—that you don’t actually eat in Cuba,” she said, because of a lack of access to ingredients. She points out that ropa vieja, a slow-cooked, shredded beef dish that is famous in the United States, is rare in Cuba because the slaughter and sale of beef is heavily regulated on the island.
With time in the United States, Melendez would not only taste, but also innovate on Cuban dishes that were difficult to obtain back home. At her food truck, she plates a mini-serving of ropa vieja on crispy tostones (fried green plantains) for a small, punchy bite of Cuba.
Though Amanda’s transition to life in Miami was marked , she became a cook during a time of desperation: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. With nothing to do, she began to cook in her Miami home, with her grandmother guiding her through Cuban classics. “Little ,” she remembers, “my love for cooking emerged.”
Claudia, who met Amanda while they were both waiting tables, could tell that she was tapping into a passion.
“She pushed me to study it,” Amanda says, and she did, enrolling in night classes at the María Moreno Culinary Institute in Miami. , she learned the fundamentals of French cooking, and continued working at a Cuban restaurant in Miami.
But that hustle was not paying off; the pandemic killed much of the business at her day job, so she needed to look for other opportunities. Again, her loved ones saw her talent and encouraged her to nurture it.
“My brother-in-law told me, ‘You cook well, why don’t you start a meal prep business?’”
Amanda took to preparing lunches in her home kitchen that Claudia would deliver to clients around Miami. Over the course of several years, her business grew from 7 clients to 80, and she had to start cooking in a ghost kitchen to handle the volume. While at school she worked a punishing schedule: she would wake up at 3 A.M., cook until around 7, take a nap, then buy groceries for the next day before heading to classes from 7 P.M. to 11 P.M. at night.
While Amanda was at school, the couple heard about an opportunity to buy a food truck, and they jumped on it. At first, they used the truck as a ghost kitchen.
In 2024, Amanda graduated from Maria Moreno with a degree in culinary arts. She and Claudia continued with their catering business in Miami, but they dreamed of leaving the city so they could show Amanda’s cooking—Cuban food with global influences—to a non-Cuban public.
Amanda’s father lives in Orlando, and on a trip to visit him, Amanda and Claudia were impressed ’s vibrant food truck scene. They wanted to become a part of it.
They applied to join five or six food truck parks before getting a call from Food Trucks Heaven. The manager offered them a spot, but there was a catch: “You have to come before the end of the week because I only have one spot available,” Amanda recalls her telling Claudia over the phone.
“We left for Orlando early the next morning.”
The first month in Kissimmee was “horrible,” Amanda remembers. One of the toughest parts of leaving was separating from her 90-year-old grandmother, with whom she had lived since arriving in the United States. On top of that, she
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