Felipe Valls

Felipe Valls is a renowned Cuban businessman and exile, founder of the emblematic Versailles restaurant who arrived in Miami as an exile in 1960 at age 25 after the revolutionary government nationalized several family businesses, including a bottle importer, a gas station, and a small nightclub, the Lido.

Son of Felipe L. Valls and Dolores Bravo, he was born in Santiago de Cuba, where he had a wonderful childhood. In 1947 his parents sent him to the United States to study at the prestigious Riverside Military Academy secondary school in Gainesville, Georgia.

In 1950 he returned to his hometown to begin his career as a businessman. He owned several successful businesses, including gas stations, a restaurant and the famous Lido Supper Club. He later opened a large plant that manufactured burlap bags for the cement industry, and represented Brockway Bottle Co. which supplied bottles to different liquor companies in Cuba, including Bacardí.

Upon arriving in Miami at age 27, Felipe had to start from scratch. He has stated: "My father, like so many other Cubans, arrived in Miami with 'one hand in front and one behind' and started working as a dishwasher in a restaurant and later was hired by a refrigeration and hospitality equipment company," says Felipe Valls Jr. to Efe, who was two years old when his parents left the island.

With an advance of one month's salary granted by the owner of the company he worked for, Valls successfully began importing coffee makers from Italy and Spain. He soon owned his first restaurant, Badía, and after selling it well a few years later, "he bought the land where the first part of the Versailles is located," a restaurant he founded in 1971.

"The name of the establishment is the result of a coincidence. Valls didn't know how to decorate it when he ran into an artist friend who carved mirrors inspired by those in the French palace. Those mirrors filled the restaurant along with candelabras, and the self-proclaimed most famous Cuban restaurant in the world adopted its odd name and its kitsch aesthetic."

The Versailles restaurant was Felipe Valls' great contribution to the history of Cubans in Miami. Valls also created the emblematic concept of "la ventanita" in Miami, which is a window to the public that offers Cuban coffee and pastries.

Currently the Versailles is considered the most famous Cuban restaurant in the world, and Valls Group has become one of the largest family enterprises in the restaurant and beverage industry in South Florida.

Five decades later, with two expansions of the premises and some modifications here and there, the celebrated Versailles preserves its good Creole cuisine and that slightly "kitsch" French air of its brilliant interior, with large windows and period mirrors engraved.

A decoration "that doesn't have much to do with Cuban things—acknowledges Valls Jr. with humor—and that was originally intended to welcome artists and the nightlife scene, poets and singers who would meet at night" in that "first" Versailles.

It is difficult to determine when and how the Versailles became the neuralgic and sentimental center of the Cuban exile. For the founder's son, it has been the media themselves that have been building the legend of this establishment as an emblem of the anti-Castro struggle and the feelings of the exiles.

Perhaps it all started, he suggests, with Florida governor and later senator Bob Graham, who during an election campaign launched the strategy "A day in the life of a...", in which one day he called the media to the Versailles and he "appeared dressed as a waiter's assistant, with his green jacket, working on the floor as a busboy"... "And he won the elections," Valls Jr. recounts with humor.

Today it is a mandatory stop, especially during election time, for politicians who come to savor their café cortadito (they have their own bean roaster) and be seen at the "ventanita" of the establishment, an invention of the founder that today should be cultural heritage of Miami-Dade County.

"Having a Cuban coffee at the window has become almost a toast to our community," he states.

And there are many Cubans who string together memories and nostalgia and gather in groups next to the window where the waitresses serve Cuban coffee, cortaditos, coladitas and guava pastries and croquettes to customers.

Local and national politicians of any political persuasion must have told themselves that the Versailles was the ideal place to "show respect and sympathy toward the Cuban community in exile and ask for their opinion," he adds.

Practically all US presidents since at least Ronald Reagan have passed through the Versailles, with the exception of Barack Obama, who earned the rejection of a large part of the exile for his "thaw" policy in relations with the Cuban Government.

Perhaps the rulers most remembered by the loyal Cuban clientele of the Versailles, he continues, are George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) and his son George W. Bush (2001-2009), who received "much affection in the county (Miami-Dade)".

But former president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) also showed up at the Versailles after his reelection and enjoyed in the "hall of mirrors" a tasty buffet of roasted pork, moros (beans) and yuca, and topped off with coffee.

Clinton assured "that it was the best café cortadito he had ever had in his life, although I don't know if he had ever had another cortadito before," laughs Valls Jr. The truth is that when the Democrat traveled to Miami "he would usually stop by the Versailles and have a cortadito."

In August 2022 former president Donald Trump also visited the Versailles restaurant.

Upon arriving from Cuba in 1960 "My father sold used refrigeration equipment to restaurants, grocery stores and supermarkets, until he began importing coffee makers from Italy and Spain. And one day he recommended to the owner of a small restaurant that was on Flagler and 12th avenue that he set up a guillotine-type ventanita so he could sell coffee to passersby," thus recalls Felipe Valls Jr., how the concept of the 'Ventanita' was born in Miami, and which today, thanks to the Versailles, has become the coffee corner that everyone knows.

"It started as a nighttime café where the artistic entertainment crowd would go, until a Cuban [Juan Pérez-Cruz, uncle of singer Pitbull] came up with the idea of incorporating French decoration in the mirrors and my father, upon seeing the design, named it Versailles," revealed Felipe Jr., about the restaurant that in its early days welcomed a maximum of 80 people, and which today has a capacity for 375 diners.

But the greatest pride for the Valls family has been maintaining the appreciation of its numerous clientele with a traditional family recipe book, a "grandmother's cooking," he says, based on the "maximum quality" of the dishes they offer, such as palomilla (beef steak), ropa vieja, arroz con pollo, Galician broth or pork cracklings.

He is survived by his partner Natty Elias; his daughters Leticia, Jeannette and his son Felipe Jr.; his ten grandchildren: Leticia, Jacqueline and Luis Felipe Tornes; Nicole, Lourdes, Desiree, Alexandra, Gabriella and Daniella Valls and Thomas V. Edwards. He is also survived by his great-grandchildren Mila and Nicolas Fernández, and Felipe Lebess. His wife, Aminta Viso de Valls, preceded him in death.