Island Life Goes On

Lately, though, there’s been an explosion. There are now thirteen breweries, with three more in the works. At the suggestion of García Smith, the tour manager for Spoon Food Tours, a group that aims to provide visitors a deep sense of the island’s culinary identity and history, I settle into the bar’s back patio with a coconut hefeweizen.

Behind us hulks a metal beast, a reminder of an even more ignoble era, not far passed. The generator is the direct result of Hurricane Maria. The storm delivered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Aid was slow; many Puerto Ricans struggled to pay for medicine, even food. The bar’s owners, Zalika Guillory and Jacob Liman, used the portable diesel-powered generator to stay open through San Juan’s two-month power outage. “Never doing that again,” Liman says.

Perhaps that should be no revelation. Puerto Rico is the easternmost of the Caribbean’s large islands, the Greater Antilles. For European voyagers crossing the Atlantic, this was the first safe harbor, the first site of abundant fresh water. That makes it a lynchpin in the Columbian Exchange, the melding of European, West African, and indigenous American cultures that was inaugurated by Christopher Columbus’ invasion. Hot peppers and potatoes went east; coffee and oranges and bananas came west.

Another afternoon, I swung out to the region of Guavate, south of the city, where La Ruta de Lechón—the “pork highway”—cuts through the island’s mountainous backbone. Once, this was a difficult route, and roadside stalls catered to weary travelers. Now that the road is smoothly paved, the stalls remain a popular weekend getaway. At Lechonera Los Amigos, I gorged on chunks of spit-roasted pork with crispy skin and tender meat. This is one of the happier products of colonialism: Pigs were first brought to this island by the Spaniards.

But Puerto Rico is a small island—a hundred miles wide, thirty-five miles long—that, so far from the mainland, so centered on beachy tourism, can fall behind on culinary trends. The lack of breweries, up until recently, is one example; the slow pace of the cocktail revolution is another: Despite an abundance of rum, at the wrong swim-up bar you’ll be served an overly sweet piña colada. (The secret, I learned, is to ask for local rum and fresh juice.

In 2007 a chef named Jose Enrique opened a restaurant, also called Jose Enrique, inside an old house at the edge of La Placita de Santurce, the city’s marketplace. Enrique had stopped home on the island between mainland cooking gigs when he stumbled upon the house. Wow, this place is dope, he remembers thinking. (The market is a hub of the city, a place where young drinkers bump into their parents, where governors mingle with fishermen. When I visited on a Tuesday afternoon, salsa was blaring and a half dozen men sat at a table, chatting merrily while sipping beer and downing fried food.) Enrique could jaunt across the street to buy produce. Back then, though, he had to take anything local farmers could offer. “I was like, ‘whatever you’re cultivating, bring it over,’” Enrique says. “You know, if you’ve got arugula, I don’t care if you’ve got four pounds or eight pounds.” He jotted his menus, which changed daily, onto a white board.

The next morning, I returned to the neighborhood—bright with street art and, at least that morning, locals walking the street with strollers, shopping in hardware and grocery stores. At Cocobana, a vegan restaurant, I sampled a novel rendition of an alcapurria, topped with a mushroom “ceviche,” and served alongside a lemon-mint-basil-infused coconut milk, which tasted like a blast from the fountain of youth. The owners, Vanessa Díaz and Manuel Collazo, see the business as a way to support the emerging local, small-scale agricultural producers.

Hurricane Maria was devastating, but also catalyzing. It destroyed 80 percent of the island’s crop value, at cost of nearly $800 million. At la Taberna Lúpelo, the beer bar, employees waited in line daily for ice and for propane. The bar stayed open, selling whatever beers they could scrounge on the island since new shipments were not coming in. La Penúltima—an excellent cocktail bar, and a counter to the tourist traps—was one of the few places in San Juan where internet access remained easy. It became a gathering place; service workers who were strangers before became friends.

Farmers are now talking about Maria as a restart, a chance to try better, more efficient methods. After the storm, the food scene is “coming back harder and bigger and more hungry,” Enrique says. Last year, Paxx Caraballo Moll, a chef who has played a key role in promoting locally sourced foodin Puerto Rico, was named to the Food & Wine best new chefs list. Moll’s kitchen, Jungle BaoBao, is tucked inside Junglebird, a tiki bar spin-off of cocktail haven La Factoría. Enrique has been making changes and recently moved into a space in a hotel district.

In this context, the quick return of locally focused cooking can be seen as evidence of rising Puerto Rico-first politics, a push for new sovereignty. After the storm, Ricardo Rosselló, one of the recently ousted governors, urged President Trump to consider statehood for the island. But Rosselló, who slashed taxes, was also friendly with the libertarians who aimed to turn the island into “Puertopia,” a haven for Bitcoin millionaires abandoning their tax-heavy mainland homes. These different futures could mean very different fates for many locals. For the culinary scene, at least, either offers good news: As Ormaza pointed out to me, if Bitcoin millionaires arrive, they’ll want good food.

These, of course, are tweezer topics. But on this island, the wounds of history can be hard to ignore, even when you’re just looking for good times. On my last evening, I stopped in at El Batey, a graffiti-laced dive bar in Old San Juan, only to find that the water was out. I drank a beer and chatted with the bartender, who explained that this fiasco is nothing new. The water cuts out a few times a year, and did so even before the storm. The difference now, he says, was that after suffering through the long recovery, he couldn’t help but wonder when it would return.

After the beer, I swung by Jose Enrique’s new location, which was in the midst of its soft launch. Here, too, there was no water. Just that morning, the restaurant had been named one of the world’s best by Food & Wine. Now it was forced to close for the night—officially, at least. Still, the bar was cluttered with locals, and Enrique was in the kitchen, sending out whatever finger food he could manage within the constraints: octopus ceviche with coconut arepas, seared tuna, deep-fried pork belly. This is Puerto Rico. Life continues. I ordered my rum and settled in.