Plan Your Plantains Wisely: How to Eat Like a Local in San Juan

In Puerto Rico, every meal seems to be infused with joy—and that’s despite its many trials and tribulations, from natural disasters and population decline to financial crises and a fraught relationship with the rest of the United States.

The food we think of as Puerto Rican today is a mix of culinary influences, including Taino, Spanish Crillo, and African, reflecting the tastes and needs of the various waves of inhabitants of the island. Since the mid-19th century, when the island’s first restaurant opened there, San Juan has been the capital not just of Puerto Rico as a political entity but as a food culture. Today, of course, as a territory of the United States, much of the island’s culture in general can be seen as part of an extended dialogue between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S., with the large Puerto Rican diaspora to places like New York City and Philadelphia serving as two-way conduits.

And who better to guide us through San Juan’s food scene than those who are both celebrated food professionals and borinqueños. For our second round of Global Eats—a food lover's guide to the culinary capitals of the world—we talked to Serious Eats contributor and cookbook author Reina Gascón-López and chef and food entrepreneur Manolo López, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico and now lives in New York City, about what makes Puerto Rican food so special, what to eat if you’re not already familiar with the cuisine, and where in and near San Juan to get the best representations of those dishes. (You'll find the first Global Eats series here.)

There’s Something About Sofrito

Before you can even begin to talk about Puerto Rican foods, you have to talk about sofrito, the aromatic mixture that typically contains finely diced and pounded onions, green and red peppers, garlic, cilantro, ají dulce peppers, cilantro, culantro, and tomatoes that forms the base of almost every core Puerto Rican dish.

“Oh my gosh, it just reminds me of home, it reminds me of the caldera, of my grandmothers,” Gascón-López says. “It reminds me of their mortars and pestles—my most cherished possession is one that belonged to my grandmother and great-grandmother and still smells of garlic in the wood. There’s no better smell than sofrito hitting hot oil in a pan. The minute you smell it, you know it’s like, ‘Oh man, dinner’s going to be good.’”

The secret to a good Puerto Rican sofrito? Not that secret, it turns out. “I like putting a lot of garlic in my sofrito,” she says. “Any sofrito is supposed to taste fresh, herbaceous, and super strong with lots of garlic, lots of pepper,” Gascón-López says. “It adds a lot of body to the dish and adds another pop of flavor.”

As you make your tasting tour of San Juan and the island, be sure to try to get a feel for how sofrito can vary from place to place and what it adds to every dish. As for where to try these dishes, we’ve got you covered in the next section.

Where to Eat in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Manzana de Java

105 Cll Pomarrosa, San Juan

No website

Ask a Puerto Rican expat the food they miss most, and odds are good they’ll say mofongo. "Mofongo’s the first thing I seek out when I go back to Puerto Rico," Gascón-López says. "My dad’ll pick me up from the airport, bags in the car, and we’ll get some mofongo to eat. Texturally, it’s like mashed potato, and it should be a little creamy but a little firm to hold its shape—if the mofongo’s falling apart, it’s too dry. If it’s wet, it’s too mushy.”

López is a fan of the mofongo at Manzana de Java, a former ramen place in a residential neighborhood that the owners converted into a small (roughly 16-seat) Puerto Rican eatery that’s “very sleek and very to the point,” he says. It's filled with Puerto Rican-born millennials looking for new takes on traditional dishes. 

Not only are the plantains prepared perfectly, but the mofongo comes with a beautiful pork broth. “You can’t miss the pork cracklings and the seasonings, and you get the adobo spice and cumin and salt and pepper, and the raw garlic—those are the scents you’re getting as you eat this.”

Of course, if you can’t make it to Manzana de Java this trip, you can always try cooking at home with Gascón-López's own recipe for mofongo.

Playa Aviones

PR-187, Carolina, 00772

Though Gascón-López’s favorite mofongo place has closed down, she recommends hitting up any of the street-side food stalls, or kioskos, along Playa Aviones on the way from San Juan to Loiza, the beach town about 30 minutes east of San Juan. There’s a single road between San Juan and Loiza, and it’s lined with these modest shacks, many of which sell excellent mofongo, platters of rice, and other treats—though they rarely accept anything but cash. 

This is also a good place to get bacalaitos, salt cod fritters, palm-size bites that are crispy and golden-brown, sometimes flecked with little green bits of cilantro, pillowy soft on the inside, and fishy and salty and spicy enough to stave away any hint of blandness.

“They have these huge vats of oil and then pour in the batter similar to how you’d make a funnel cake, and then they use a kebab or big metal skewer and stab them out of the oil and let them drain,” she says. “You see the rows of fritters just sitting under the heat lamps, and then somebody next door is feeding chickens, and someone else at another kiosko is cutting coconuts as you sit in your little shack across the street from the beach eating your bacalaitos.”

La Alcapurria Quemá

251 C. Duffaut

Everyone in Puerto Rico seems to be, quite understandably, wild about tostones. Everyone also seems to have a favorite place to get them—Gascón-López, for example, swears by the tostones at almost any Chinese takeout joint.

“I’m not even kidding—I don’t know what they do to them, but they’re very thin and crispy and still kind of fluffy in the middle from the plantain,” she says. “And then they smash them in this ajo sauce, which is phenomenal”—and in line with her own recipe for tostones, which was “the way my mom made them: really garlicky.”

For a less-garlicky, arguably more traditional Puerto Rican tostone, you could also try them at La Alcapurria Quemá, a nondescript, no-A/C, cafeteria-like place in the lively neighborhood of La Placita de Santurce, where you take your food to sidewalk tables as old-school salsa music blasts from the speakers and pigeons try to sneak crumbs of your delicious fresh tostones off your plate. It’s a favorite of López’s.

“Oh my God, it’s a crispy, gold coin of perfection, with crispy edges and a crunchy bite to it but still soft in the middle, and always hot,” López says.

El Rancho Original

km 27.5, Carr. 184, Cayey

El Rancho Original is a lechonera, or roast pork restaurant, on Puerto Rico's "Pork Highway" in Guavate, in the mountains about an hour south of San Juan. It’s a popular place for San Juan families to go for special occasions and easy, cooler-weather day trips—and barbecued pork from the lechoneras that line the road up the mountain. 

Gascón-López’s family counts El Rancho Original among its favorites, despite its utilitarian aesthetics. You queue up at counters to order your food and then take them in Styrofoam clamshells back to aluminum benches. You do, however, get to set up shop next to a waterfall and a bridge over a babbling stream. Here, innumerable rows of pigs and chickens spin slowly on spits over licking flames and dripping pans. It’s the place to get tender, garlicky lechon and pernil (“with super crispy, paper-thin skin”), little cups filled with sides of yucca, boiled green bananas, morcilla (blood sausage), menudo (tripe soup), arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas), and enough cold beers for the group, and then hang out all afternoon. 

“It’s literally on this hill with a waterfall, and it’s the most picturesque thing you can ever see, just sitting there eating a ton of pork in the jungle,” she says.

Pollos Scharneco

1050 Av. Juan Ponce de León

Like in many countries around the world, whole roast chicken is popular all over Puerto Rico, cooked over open flames on roadside shacks or served with more fanfare and actual tables and seats at higher-end restaurants. López likes his from a place somewhere in the middle, Pollos Scharneco, a newish corner restaurant in San Juan that clearly has ambitions of a franchise, with red cartoon roosters stenciled onto stark, clinically white walls, a walk-up fast-food-style counter and menu board, and fast-food style counter seating and stools that perfectly match the brand’s bright red-white-yellow palette. Even the food is delivered on bright red plastic trays that could have come from a McDonald’s circa 1980.

It’s also a good place for arroz con gandules, López says, which is the perfect dish for a well-rested, luscious roast chicken. The rice, loaded with little popping pigeon peas, lends a sofrito-driven richness and complexity that complements the juicy chicken.

Having grown up on the island, López still associates the side dish with his childhood. “My grandma used to have a pigeon pea tree in the back of her house, and back in the day you would go back there, fill up one bucket with the pods, and then your family would sit in the house and pop the peas out and throw the pods into another bucket, then wash the peas and cook them,” he says. “I remember the first time I saw pigeon peas in a can, I was like, ‘Why would you do that? You’re supposed to go get those in the backyard.’”

Celeste

100 C. Pelayo, San Juan

Ceviche is a popular dish in Puerto Rico, though Puerto Rican ceviche doesn’t get as much attention outside of the island as mofongo or tostones. At Celeste, the owners, two brothers, take each day’s catch and work wonders with it in a small, reservations-a-must space in an old San Juan building with tall, arched windows and a simple but elegant aesthetic of white plates on white tablecloth that lets the seafood itself take the spotlight.

“They nail the leche de tigre [the mixture of lime juice, onion, chiles, and other ingredients used to cure ceviche], using fresh coconut milk, sometimes passion fruit dressing on top or ají amarillo, or Valencia oranges when they’re in season,” López says.

Cocina Al Fondo

658 C. San Juan

James Beard-winning chef Natalia Vallejo opened Cocina Al Fondo in the Santurce barrio of the city. López likes her selection of fricasés, or stews, though the exact type can vary by what’s in season or at the market—López is fond of the goat.

“You’re talking about this really hearty stew, which at the base is the sofrito, and then she layers on the other vegetables and flavors,” he says. “By the time it gets to your table, the meat has still got a bite, along with your carrots, your potatoes—it’s really a comfort food for us.”

Vallejo designed her restaurant to look like an old-style Puerto Rican mansion filled with plants and understated artwork that are muted compared to the colors of the foods on her plates.

“You feel like you’re in an old casona, an old palace, with high ceilings, rustic wood, and nothing modern about it,” López says. “The seats are low, the plates are vintage ones she sourced in Puerto Rico, and when you’re sitting at the outdoor tables, you’re sitting on vintage seats on gravel.”

Santaella

219 C. Canals, San Juan

Seafood is a serious passion on the island, and beautiful, upscale Santaella is the place to get dishes like whole fried snapper with a side of tostones with mojo sauce or a starter of alcapurrias, a fritter of mashed taro and green bananas stuffed with meat or seafood. 

“They understand balance in food so well and have access to the freshest foods that come into the market at La Placita,” López says. “If it’s mango season, then you’ll eat diced mango and cilantro and a little oil and have that brightness throughout your dish.”

Bodega Esquina Gastronómica

Esquina Baldorioty, 6 C. Celís Aguilera, Caguas

About half an hour’s drive south of San Juan, in the seemingly untouched old town center of the sleepy town of Caguas, is Bodega Esquina Gastronómica. There, the chef-owners have earned a reputation for excellent locavore Puerto Rican food that's drawing in food lovers from all over the island. It’s much needed patronage in a town that, in recent years, has been battered by hurricanes and earthquakes and is still, much like the rest of Puerto Rico, slowly recovering.

“The crazy thing is that you step out of the restaurant and you’re in Old Puerto Rico—you have one of the old bakeries from the 1930s next to the restaurant, and then next to that, they sell birdseed,” López says. “And yet they’re bringing in clientele from San Juan and other parts of the island, building back their community and their town.”

The pink-and-white, sweet-16-cake exterior belies the sleek, modern scene inside, with softly yellow–backlit cocktail bar and shelves of liquors, executive boardroom-style upholstered seats, tables of dark wood, simple but elegant tableware and a hip, young, enthusiastic clientele clearly keyed into the cutting-edge food scene of the island. 

López especially likes it when they have octopus on the menu, as he finds the notoriously tricky seafood is done extremely well at Bodega. It’s braised and seasoned with smoked paprika and paired with confit potatoes.

“You cut into the octopus and it has a little bit of resistance, but when you bite into it, it’s super soft, just masterfully done,” he says.

Via Lactea

1353 Av. Juan Ponce de León

Finally, you could finish off the day with “desserts that are just out of this world” at the nondairy ice cream shop Via Lactea, López says.

“One fruit ice cream they’ve got is soursop, a great, green globe with pointy things coming out of it that’s one of the best fruits in the world,” he says. 

Using a base of coconut milk, the soursop ice cream, which smells like pineapple but tastes like a heavenly combination of strawberry, apple, and citrus, is “one of the most intense you can eat.” 

Paired with a black cone made from activated charcoal, the contrasting white soursop ice cream makes for “great optics” and memorable Insta pics.

¡Buen Provecho!

“Buen provecho!” is something you say to dining companions at the start of a meal—or even to a stranger you've made eye contact with on your way out of a restaurant. More than a simple “enjoy your meal,” it’s a signifier of community and manners and acknowledges the connection you and that person share as human beings and as two people both reveling in the bounty that is the island’s food scene.

“It’s a very local thing to do, but locals enjoy it when visitors to Puerto Rico say that to them,” Gascón-López says. “It’s like, ‘Hey, I’m in your space but being cool about it.’”

“It’s cool to partake in that,” López agrees.

So go visit Puerto Rico and enjoy its rich, diverse food culture—and buen provecho!