Between the slick black lacquer, the sexy red lanterns, the chopsticks and the scent of garlic, you'd think I was sitting in San Juan's latest nouvelle Asian restaurant. And I am --sort of.
Something has happened to the simple bistec encebollado (sauteed beefsteak and onions) and fried sweet plantains dripping into moist white rice that were staples of the Puerto Rican food I grew up with. Go to San Juan today and that steak has become marinated, grilled flank steak. The sweet plantain is now served in a timbale and blended with portobello mushrooms topped with a chimichurri sauce. Conch, once found mostly in deliciously greasy fritters or vinaigrette, now fills delicate spring rolls accented with an orange reduction sauce. Even the Puerto Rican french fry, the tostón --fried green plantain --is scaling new culinary heights; topped with sour cream and caviar, it's the local appetizer of choice. And here at Dragonfly, one of Old San Juan's hottest restaurants, where both the chic and local chefs come to graze, old-fashioned Puerto Rican cooking has been fused with (gasp!) Asian cuisine into something utterly different, yet utterly right -- like the Asian Marinated Churasco con DragonFries.
Dragonfly and its renowned sister restaurant, The Parrot Club, across the street on the buzzing south end of Fortaleza Street in Old San Juan, are part of a new generation of Puerto Rican restaurants. The old familiar ingredients are all there --viandas, or root vegetables: yuca, white and yellow sweet potato; plantains, red snapper, grouper, pork, calabaza, or pumpkin, beans of every stripe --but they've moved out of our mothers' kitchens and into the spotlight, transforming into cassoulets, raviolis, timbales, confits. They are also keeping upscale company: foie gras, gorgonzola, parmigiano reggiano and mille foglie have joined the party.
My taste buds are delighted, but my head is confused. How did we get from cod fritters on the beach to vertical food in restaurants with linen tablecloths and dizzying numbers of forks in little more than a decade?
They say that Puerto Ricans would be Puerto Rican even if they were born on the moon. That is certainly true for me; born and raised in New York, every summer we'd pile onto a plane headed for Puerto Rico, eat ourselves silly and come back with coolers full of goodies, frozen for the long trip north, to defrost little by precious little when somebody's homesickness bit. When I finally went to live in Puerto Rico as an adult, I promptly gained 10 pounds, mostly around the butt --which in Puerto Rico, thankfully, is still a good thing.
Now, once again living off-island, I am also back to being a visitor. Each time I return, I'm amazed at how the country's cuisine is evolving. And visitors can sample it all, from the heavy-duty, cholesterol-laden originals to the latest in fusion and Latino-lite.
To know where it all started, you have to trek back to the days of the original inhabitants, the Taíno Indians.
''The natives ate mostly root vegetables; yuca (cassava), malanga (taro), batata mameye (sweet potato) were already there when Columbus arrived,'' says Patricia Wilson, chef and assistant professor at the prestigious Johnson & Wales University in Miami. Raised by Canadian parents in the coastal town of Arecibo, once a molasses-scented rum-producing town, Wilson ran and owned several contemporary Puerto Rican restaurants before becoming an erstwhile ambassador for Puerto Rican food, offering cooking workshops around the United States, including Hawaii, and as far away as Morocco. ''They used some fish, but seem to have eaten more bats and iguanas.''
Fortunately bats are no longer part of the Puerto Rican cuisine --although my father tells me that iguana tastes like chicken --but some other important ingredients are.
''The Taíno used lots of yuca or cassava and called it the bread of the earth,'' Wilson says. ''Barbacoa, or barbecue, is very likely an Arawak word. They also ate land crab or jueyes, as we do today. There wasn't a lot here, but interestingly there may have been corn and peppers from the Mexicans.''
The arrival of the Portugese, Spanish and English brought death to an untold number of Taínos, but it also brought new ingredients.
''The colonizers brought different plants from home to see if they would take in the New World,'' says Wilson. ''They tried pears and apples, which didn't work, but they also tried sugarcane from Southeast Asia. That turned to gold.''
While sugarcane, coffee from North Africa and tobacco became cash crops, mango and tamarind from India, gunga beans (gandules or pigeon peas), okra, plantains and bananas from Africa, and coconuts from the South Pacific influenced the criollo (creole) diet. The Spanish brought salt cod, rice, olives, capers, onion and garlic, as well as tomatoes --a minor New World fruit that was cultivated and brought back as a major Old World staple. African slaves, brought to replace the disappearing Taínos, cooked the way they had back home; the familiar fragrances and flavors must have left a bittersweet taste. They set up pots over a fire and fried or stewed their meals, probably using pork scraps from the master's kitchen to add flavor and fat to their root and greens stews.
The Africans also adopted an important technique from the Taínos, who may have got it from their Mexican cousins. They began to wrap and steam food, much in the style of the Mexican tamale, only in Puerto Rico the batter was of plantain and the wrapping of banana leaves. This was the birth of pasteles, the pork or chicken stuffed plantain envelopes that are the flavor of Puerto Rican Christmas. And the Africans learned from the Ta'nos to use culantro and recao, herbs that grew wild and that today are the base of the Puerto Rican roux --sofrito.
Much the same thing was going on in the rest of the Caribbean, and each island's history is reflected in the cuisine. In Trinidad, for example, creole cooking incorporates thyme and scallions, a legacy of the primarily English colonization. Cuba's cooking is more completely Spanish, but its reliance on cumin may come from its large Lebanese population. The new Puerto Ricans seasoned their beans with native calabaza (pumpkin) instead of meat.
Today's traditional cuisine is kept up by women like Nilsa Otero --Doña Nilsa --who tends to her brother's fruit and vegetable stand in the newly restored Plaza del Mercado de Santurce, one of San Juan's largest and oldest markets. My mother lived around the corner when she went to high school; in those days her mother or her great-aunt would go there to pick up the ingredients for the evening meal. When I lived in San Juan, I'd drive over with a shopping basket on Saturday mornings and load up on fragrant cilantro, ají--the local nonspicy Scotch bonnet pepper --culantro and root vegetables, which were only intermittently available, less fresh and more expensive in the regular supermarket. Now, the Santurce market is bustling again, thanks partly to a revived interest in the traditional flavors of the island and partly to an injection of municipal funds into the declining area. During the day, shoppers head inside the 19th-century building to sort through the dangling bunches of plantains and the colorful trays of fruits and produce from all over the island: celeriac and chayote from Barranquitas, taro from La Piedra, calabaza pumpkin from Coamo; hot pepper from Trujillo Alto; pineapple from Lajas; juicy mango from Mayagez; papaya from Salinas; firm eggplant from Santa Isabel; okra from Guanica.
Once they've stocked up, they eat enormous lunches at the creole restaurants around the market building --Don Tello being the most modern and Restaurant Popular the most authentic --before heading home to cook their own meals.
When the doors of the market close, the happy-hour crowd takes over outside, buying drinks from stands around the square; even the butcher shop sells beer and makes room for dancers.
There are live bands on Friday nights; the atmosphere is high-energy, with office workers in suits, ties or heels cutting loose the way Puerto Ricans have for several hundred years --a little rum, a little music, fried snacks and a lot of high-volume conversation.
Doña Nilsa grew up in the neighborhood and has been working at the kiosk for more than 20 years. She sells the produce, but also makes products --sofritos, for home cooks who lack the time to chop all the onions and peppers and herbs that home cooking requires; and pique del pa's, homemade hot sauce sold in 200-milliliter rum bottles. Puerto Rican cooking is well-seasoned, but rarely spicy. We usually add the hot sauce at the table.
While she is a traditional cook, Doña Nilsa says even her cuisine has evolved. ''I cook the way my mother did,'' the grandmother of 11 says. ''Except I add more spices; everybody does these days. But you know, with the few condiments she used, it still came out better than mine.''
Doña Nilsa says she sees more and more young women coming to the market to buy their vegetables. ''They start coming when they get pregnant to eat better,'' she says with satisfaction. ''Then they keep coming. They bring me pictures of their children.''
There is another population of dedicated plaza shoppers: the new breed of local chef, scouring the market for freshness, local flavor and inspiration.
Greater island prosperity, the chef-as-celebrity phenomenon in the U.S. and the growing popularity of fusion cuisine may be some of the reasons young Puerto Ricans are taking off to culinary school in growing numbers. But one man stands out as the godfather of new Puerto Rican cuisine --Alfredo Ayala, a former industrial engineer who returned to Puerto Rico in 1981 with a singular dream: to take everything he'd learned about food while living in Europe, South America and California and apply it to his beloved Puerto Rican food.
His first restaurant, Ali-Oli, set the Puerto Rican dining-out set on its ear. Accustomed to eating simple Puerto Rican food at home, they expected a gourmet meal to be French or continental. No one had ever suggested that criollo food could aspire to be haute.
Time proved Ayala right, and he soon moved his packed-to-the-rafters restaurant from the outskirts of the metropolitan area into central Santurce.
He later opened Chayote, another sensational restaurant --now owned by someone else --and Su Casa, still going strong in the Hyatt Dorado.
I find out firsthand why everyone loves Ayala's food, and the man himself, when he invites me to dinner at his home in Ocean Park.
''When I returned to Puerto Rico, all you could find were alleged Spanish restaurants,'' he tells me as he pours champagne and fries gorgeous floured snapper fillets in his colorful tiled kitchen. ''There was nothing Puerto Rican except fondas [small workmen's lunch spots], and nobody dared start anything a little more upscale. I dared, and a movement got started.''
The snapper fillets end up in a delicate consommé of celeriac, onion and ginger --which grows wild locally. We move onto foie gras with boiled breadfruit and then munch on classic fried chicken with rice and white beans. Simple, filling, delicious.
Ayala's revolutionary ideas (such as substituting local tubers for potatoes to create creole vichyssoise) inspired a generation of aspiring Puerto Rican chefs to get a formal education in international culinary techniques and apply them to local ingredients.
Wilo Benet, the best-known and most successful chef of this young generation, is among those Ayala inspired. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, he did a long stint as executive chef to the governor before opening his award-winning restaurant, Pikayo, now located in the new Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico.
''This is not really nuevo latino,'' Benet tells me over a tasting menu that includes hummus served with plantain chips, black risotto and chanquetes (a small Spanish eel), shrimp and julienned chorizo in a soursop beurre blanc, and Chilean fish called reineta (little queen), accompanied by a Rioja and Quinta Noval '66 Oporto.
He calls his own style exótico criollo. ''We don't really have a defined nuevo puertorriqueno cuisine either. We are so in the process of all this. I myself wanted nothing to do with rice and beans or plantains, until one day I decided to do mofongo [fried green plantain mash], and immediately I knew what my mission was: to represent my vision of Puerto Rico in the culinary arts.''
While the '80s were a period of self-discovery for Puerto Rican cooking, the '90s were prone to excesses: seven different herbs pureed over three exotic mushrooms, layered between five different tubers with five reductions fingerpainted onto the plate, the whole vertical construction ready to tip over the moment you dared to actually lay your fork on it.
The 2000s seem to be a happy medium. More creole restaurants are refining old classics without changing them so much, and focusing on quality produce.
The gourmet set is also focusing on using fewer ingredients and balancing the flavors. And if the old ways are not always best, there are some things that are just too good to change. Even a cutting-edge chef like Wilo Benet recognizes it. On his menu, next to the halibut with wilted arugula and grilled salmon in truffle mojito, there it is -- my old friend bistec encebollado, maybe not exactly the same as Mami and Papi used to make, but that's progress.
And as for Alfredo Ayala, the godfather of Puerto Rico cooking? He's also going back to the basics.
Ayala's new project is outside of San Juan, on the road to El Yunque rain forest. It's a down-home restaurant called Las Vegas, where he serves pasteles, fried pork chops, bistec, goat stew -- all the lip-smacking classics I grew up eating -- and eating and eating.
''I'm going very criollo, as authentic as possible,'' he says. ''We all used to eat very well at home. Now it's difficult to find true, good Puerto Rican food, and that's what I want to serve.''
Posted online 09/12/01.
