An Evening at A Little Taste of Cuba and Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust Cigars

The last month or so I’ve been resisting going out to cigar shops. I’ve been antisocial, careful with dollars, and busy hunting for the next opportunity. I still get my daily walks in with a cigar, but have been laying low as far as cigar events go.  Last night my wife and I took a drive to Princeton, NJ to A Little Taste of Cuba. You may recall last year we visited the A Little Taste of Cuba in New Hope, PA to meet up with Kevin of CigarProp fame. A Little Taste of Cuba is owned by Jorge Armenteros, who is the guy behind Tobacconist University, which is a course that teaches about everything cigar, pipe and tobacco. Jorge describes the Princeton store the flagship store, and it’s a very nice shop.  It’s New Jersey, so I had a little sticker shock being used to PA prices, but they offered a Dunbarton Tobacco & Trust sampler with a Sobremesa Short Churchill (which I smoked first), Mi Querida Ancho Corto (smoked second) and Gordito, Todos Las Dias Double Wide Belicoso and an Umbagog Short and Fat. Honestly, I would have bought a handful of Umbagogs and been happy, but the price of the sampler versus the price of the Umbagogs made the sampler a better value. Of course, the two cigars I smoked were fantastic. Unlike the New Hope shop, the Princeton store has a lounge a half a flight up from the store area. The seating was comfortable, and the smoke eaters were noisy, but effective. There were a dozen to 15 people in there smoking over the course of the evening and it wasn’t that bad.

Did I mention Steve Saka and his wife, Cindy, were there?  It was a casual non-event event, they were just there to hang out and we decided to run out there and hang out with them. Steve was losing his voice, which made it hard for me to hear all the nuggets of wisdom emanating from him, but a lot of it I’ve heard before. My hearing is impaired, so the combination of the drone from the air cleaner and Steve’s gravely voice made it hard to follow any one conversation, but I was enjoying the crap out of the cigars I was smoking, so it didn’t much matter. It’s always great to spend a little time with Steve and Cindy, terrific people.  I also ran into my old friend Alex Martinez, who I met back in 2013 when I was up in the Lyndhurst, NJ area for a few days. Always nice to reconnect.

Two more quick little things n my mind:  First, we were out at a fabric store yesterday with one of our granddaughters getting her some patterns and fabric for projects, and I came across some interesting fabric. Fabric stores make me anxious since childhood, not sure why, maybe it’s the overwhelming variety, or the cluttered feeling, but I’m uncomfortable in them. So I wasn’t just pacing around with my hands in my pockets, my wife told me to go look for some cigar fabric, and don’t you know I found some, and bought the whole bolt! Oddly, there’s a billion patterns for women’s clothes, but only like seven for men. I guess we buy our clothes as opposed to making them! Second, I once again found that smoking a strong cigar late at night gives me some weird-ass dreams and isn’t good for my sleep! No cigars after 9pm, I guess!  Crazy!

That’s all for now, until the next time,

CigarCraig