San Juan, Puerto Rico – One of the great things about visiting Puerto Rico is that it is a territory of the United States. One of the rotten things about visiting Puerto Rico is that it is a territory of the United States.
When it comes to food, you can see Uncle Sam on almost every street corner. Oops. Sorry. That’s the Colonel. He’s just beyond the Golden Arches and right before that gross Burger King logo. San Juan has so many fast-food franchises, you could walk here along the banks of the Caribbean Sea and swear you were on an off-ramp in Thornton.
San Juan is usually my base to catch puddle jumpers to more exotic locales. I was always more familiar with the San Juan airport’s connection gates than its food scene.
But on a Caribbean stint last month, I learned something about food in San Juan. It has the best in the Caribbean. You can look it up. My “Rough Guide to the Caribbean” reads, “San Juan is garnering a reputation as the culinary capital of the Caribbean.” Frommer’s writes, “San Juan has the widest array of restaurants in the Caribbean.”
It has received major international play from former world boxing champion Tito Trinidad and singer Ricky Martin, two native sons who have traveled with their own Puerto Rican chefs and touted the cuisine as the best in the world.
Who knew?
I didn’t. My most memorable meal previously in San Juan was … was … um, I couldn’t remember one. I feel the same way about my visits to Des Moines.
But San Juan is carving out a name in a region that offers competition as stiff as the rum I had on this trip. (I woke up on my last day with an eye patch and a parrot.) There’s the jerk cuisine of Jamaica, the curried seafood of Tobago, the grilled flying-fish sandwiches in St. Kitts and Nevis and, of course, the Fish Friday of my beloved St. Lucia.
This isn’t like being the best restaurant in Rifle. San Juan has risen above the competition, if you buy the hype, by combining Old and New World cuisines. It’s Spanish colonialization meets American innovation.
It can all be found in Old San Juan. Think New Orleans’ French Quarter with a samba beat. Its narrow, brick streets lined with small, pastel buildings of pink, aqua, yellow and orange, all adorned with elaborately ordained wrought-iron balconies and flowerpots. Only the iron-barred gates on the closed storefronts indicate the atmosphere here isn’t always Spanish love songs.
I walked past old men playing dominoes in a dimly lit plaza and a church where parishioners sang hymns before I found El Jibarito. The woman at my hotel called it “the best local food in all of Puerto Rico.”
I walked into the scruffy place and immediately stepped into the 1700s, when a crumbling Spanish empire made Puerto Rico one of its guiding lights. A balding, middle-aged man played Spanish ballads on a guitar, seemingly for an invisible señorita on the little balcony above him.
I sat down at a simple table, and my waiter recommended cube steak, Ricky Martin’s favorite dish and the only thing I’ll ever have in common with him.
“It’s what I eat every day for lunch,” said the waiter, Luis Colon.
Along with a hearty, complimentary soup of noodles and rich broth, the cube steak was a big pile of strip steak, barely seasoned, but savory and beautiful in its simplicity. Accompanying it was a Puerto Rican diet staple. Mofongo is mashed plantain with garlic and butter. Presented in a big, lumpy, yellow cube, it looks like lemon Jell-O that went bad. However, it tastes wonderful, like sweetened mashed potatoes.
The next day I moved up a couple of centuries. At The Parrot Club a heavily tattooed, tanned goddess in a black beret with no a trace of a Spanish accent sat me down in a bright, airy room. Painted palm leaves splashed across arches along the ceiling and wildly colored modern art adorned the walls. The long, stained-wood bar with the huge mirror could’ve passed in a five-star hotel in San Francisco.
The Parrot Club is one of San Juan’s many homes to Nuevo Latino. Picture Latin fusing with French, Spanish, Asian and South American.
My “carne frita con guava glaze” was simple pan-fried pork chunks, but the guava glaze gave it a more modern twist. So did the tropical coleslaw, spiced with pineapple. Or I could’ve had a Nuevo Cubano sandwich featuring traditional roast pork with Gruyere cheese or the seared salmon with salted cod and roasted peppers.
Nuevo Latino has been around here since the 1980s but the continual updating, plus French, Turkish and Indian restaurants, have made San Juan the culinary king of the Caribbean.
“By far,” said a Parrot Club chef, Guillermo Gonzalez, who worked in Ricky Martin’s Miami restaurant, Casa Salsa. “This is the 21st century, and we need to be updated with any big city, any culinary place in the world, just like New York and San Francisco. We want to be known as a culinary island.”
So next time you have a layover in San Juan, don’t just change planes. Change restaurants.
Staff writer John Henderson covers sports and writes about the food he eats on the road. He can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
If you go
El Jibarito, 280 Calle Sol, San Juan, 787-725-8375,.
The Parrot Club, 363 Calle Fortaleza, San Juan, 787-725-7370.
