Rum Cake Lady Cuban Café doesn’t blend into its surroundings. The red cottage adorned with a Cuban flag sits on the edge of downtown Blue Ridge, Georgia, flanked by palm trees and a rooster lawn ornament. In the small Southern town located roughly an hour and a half from both Atlanta and Chattanooga, it’s a beacon for Cuban food enthusiasts far from the island.
Owner Liz Correa—the self-proclaimed “rum cake lady”—never planned on going into the restaurant business. Born in Cuba, Correa and her husband lived in Miami until a family friend showed them the beauty of Appalachia. Feeling inspired and looking to put down roots after giving birth to her second son at 45 years old, Correa and her husband settled on Blue Ridge. Then, when Correa’s mother passed away, her family began requesting her rum cakes, so Correa got to baking the recipe she’d inherited.
“I started making rum cakes because there was nowhere for childcare, so I couldn’t go out and find a job,” she says. “I just started doing it part-time.”
Correa’s original rum cake is a nod to the classic rum cakes you find in the Caribbean: lushly dense with vanilla, rum, and almonds. “In Cuba, because rum was so abundant, they put rum in everything,” says Correa. “They put rum in bread pudding, they put rum in flan, they put rum in cake because of Bacardi.” As demand for her cakes grew, she expanded from a cottage bakery in her home to a commercial kitchen space giving her room to experiment.
“I’m a chocolate lover, so I started making a chocolate rum cake,” Correa says. “Then, because I love Italian limoncello liqueur, I started making limoncello rum cake. And it just evolved as the customers requested.” The original rum cake remains the most popular, but the limoncello “has a fan base of its own.”
Because there are no other Cuban restaurants in the area, Correa added Cuban classics to her menu like sandwiches, papa rellenas (mashed potato fritters stuffed with ground beef), yuca fries, and empanadas filled with chicken, beef, and spinach. In 2017, she opened her first brick-and-mortar location in Blue Ridge, which offers seating in an enclosed patio.
The space is small but mighty. Customers are greeted with a market, where rum cakes in many flavors and sizes line the shelves alongside Correa’s housemade jams and other products beloved by Cubans, like moka pot coffee makers, which make coffee as potent as espresso on the stovetop. The real draw, though, is the food, which is ordered at the counter.
Correa’s Cuban sandwiches are traditionally made with roasted pork (although she shreds it instead of slicing it), pineapple-marinated bolo ham, Swiss cheese, pickles, and mustard. They’re hefty and succulent, with Cuban bread shipped in from Tampa that crunches appropriately when you bite through. Fried sweet plantains round out the meal, and a guava-and-cheese-filled pastelito makes a perfect treat to take on the road.
When Correa first started selling her Cuban food, however, there was a learning curve for the customers, many of whom hadn’t been exposed to the cuisine before. “They thought we were Mexican. So they would say, ‘Another Mexican restaurant?’ because we have 10 Mexican restaurants in a 10-mile radius,” says Correa. Some customers even requested jalapeños on their Cubans and tried ordering breakfast burritos. Correa held firm: “I had to stick to it. I think that really has been our success. They know they come to us and they’ll have an authentic Cuban experience,” she says.
Correa’s gumption has paid off—today, Rum Cake Lady Cuban Café is beloved by Blue Ridge residents and visitors alike, and she opened a second location in McCaysville in 2019. For Correa, sharing her heritage in the foothills of Appalachia is an honor. “I am not a trained chef,” she says. “I can only cook what my mother taught me. To be able to have people enjoy that is the biggest privilege in the world.”
