This has to be a rare moment at Sonia's Seafood Market & Restaurant, the boisterous, only-in-Miami fish joint on an unglamorous canal off Calle Ocho.

No one is ever at a standstill here, least of all the electric Sonia Salomon, who ricochets around the no-frills, open-air place greeting customers, even first-timers, like old friends.

''¡Bienvenidos a Sonia's!'' she'll say in that hypercharged way, and maybe she'll even plant a kiss on your cheek.

But this afternoon, she's sitting at a quiet corner table, fighting tears and recounting the horrors she saw at sea when she left Cuba on the Mariel boatlift with her husband, father, brothers and 5-year-old daughter.

''If I had known what that trip out of Cuba was going to be like, I would have never exposed my daughter to any of it,'' she says softly.

Sonia has to be cajoled into telling the story. She would much rather be laughing and carrying on. After all, her restaurant strives to keep the party going all day, every day.

The salsa and merengue are always cranking. The servers are regularly called to shake it on the improvised dance floor -- just a slab of concrete near the front, usually wet from the constant hosing down of the adjacent fish market. And the decorations create an explosion of holidays past and yet to come. At Sonia's, every day is Christmas, New Year's, Halloween, Easter, Fat Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo, the Fourth of July and your birthday.

''If we hang something up for Christmas, it will stay up through five Christmases,'' Sonia says. ``Why not? We are always celebrating here. The day you get divorced, come on over. We'll celebrate that, too!''

No wonder Sonia is reluctant to take herself down a few notches and talk about the past. ''No, no. I don't like talking about things that are disagreeable,'' she says, about how she and her family scraped to get by during their first few months in the United States.

Her husband, Luis, moved in with distant relatives in Southwest Miami so he could be near a construction gig while Sonia and her daughter stayed with other relatives in Hialeah. Against everyone's wide-eyed admonitions, and with her little girl in tow, she would hitch rides from strangers (not an uncommon practice in post-revolutionary Cuba) so that they could get across town to see her husband during the six months they were apart.

After the family had been here a couple of years, Sonia and Luis settled into regular jobs -- he in construction and, later, in rebuilding auto transmissions; she in office work. To supplement their income, they started selling fresh seafood on weekends at the long-defunct Tropicaire Flea Market on Bird Road.

In Cuba, Luis was a construction foreman, Sonia a ninth-grade math teacher. They didn't know a thing about buying and selling seafood. But a friend convinced them that there was money to be made if they went to the Keys for this kind of fish and to the west coast of Florida for that kind of fish. They learned the business the hard way. After the flea market closed in the mid-1990s, the Salomons opened a warehouse and began distributing fresh fish to local restaurants. In 1999, they bought the dilapidated bait-and-tackle shop at 7501 SW Eighth St. that would become Sonia's.

''We went through so much when we got here from Cuba. My husband sold snow cones through the streets of Little Havana. He went around collecting scrap metal. I sewed buttons at a factory. What didn't we do to put food on the table? But the worst of it was at sea,'' Sonia whispers.

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