A Taste of Home Cooking

The New York Times
July 4, 2007
Party With Pig: In Puerto Rico, a Glorious Feast
By CINDY PRICE

SAN JUAN, P.R.

IT’S a big mess,” Alfredo Ayala said, shaking his head and raising his eyebrows as if to ask: Are you sure you want to do this?

Let’s see. Do I want to travel deep into the central mountains of Puerto Rico to toss back Medalla Light beers with hundreds of locals in an all-day street party with live music, dancing and rotisserie pig?

“Where should we meet?” I asked.

And that’s how it goes in Puerto Rico — one minute you are sharing a civilized glass of red wine on the front porch of Delirio, Mr. Ayala’s restaurant here, and the next, you’re mapping out a plan to party in the hills with the pigs. Specifically, I was after Guavate, a little barrio about 45 minutes south of here that’s home to more than a dozen lechoneras — restaurants that serve the traditional Christmas lechón asado, or roasted pig, year-round.

Though there are pig roasts all over Puerto Rico, Guavate is the hub. What started as a handful of lechoneras has swelled to about 15 in the last two decades. Every Sunday afternoon, hundreds of locals descend on Guavate, slowly snaking their cars up the mountain along Route 184. The lechoneras really start to appear where the road hits the Carite Forest, and that’s where the party happens.

It’s not lost on me that I’ve asked Mr. Ayala, a renowned chef who studied with Joël Robuchon, to escort me to a pig roast in the woods. This is a man you approach for his duck meatball recipe or advice on how many minutes to cook octopus to avoid a chewy center. But Mr. Ayala grew up in these mountains and was reared on the local cooking, cocina criolla.

I had just one reservation. Let’s just say that I prefer to sit with my back to a Peking duck presentation. Was it going to be freaky to see all those dead pigs strung up in the restaurant windows like prizes at a county fair?

Probably. But then I started thinking about the (bacon) distance between (ham and my mouth) what we eat and how it’s packaged, and how good (pork chops are) it would feel to get back to (bologna) the source of my food. Really, looking those pigs in the eye was pretty organic if you thought about it.

According to Mr. Ayala, some of the best lechón is actually a short drive southwest of Guavate, at a lechonera called El Cuñao. I found the restaurant along Highway 1, a quiet road that was once the main route to Ponce, before the expressway sprang up. Back then, it was a popular pit stop for truckers looking for a lechón fix, but these days it caters to a well-heeled office crowd and daytrippers stretching their legs.

After a few confusing minutes at the door, I was waved to a table in the deserted back room. “Gringo section?” I asked, and the waiter smiled. It turned out to be a gesture to get me closer to the kitchen so Awilda Vega, who speaks English, could stop cooking and poke her head out to take my order.

Besides the basic side dishes, like rice with pigeon peas or boiled root vegetables, there were pasteles — rich tamales of mashed green bananas, yautía and calabaza (a pumpkin-size squash) with pork filling that are then wrapped in banana leaves and boiled. Another classic side is morcilla, a type of sausage. Ms. Vega, whose family owns the restaurant, pointed to it and said, “You try it, and then I’m going to tell you what’s in it.”

When I told her I already knew it was blood sausage, she erupted in giggles. Unlike some blood sausages, morcilla is meatless, with a straight filling of blood, rice, garlic, peppers and recao (Puerto Rican for the herb culantro, not to be confused with cilantro). I had heard it was spicy, but I found it gummy and flavorless, except near the crispy ends.

“At Christmas, we make 400 pounds of it,” Ms. Vega said. Four hundred pounds of blood sausage? Good night. These people were like Mongols preparing for war. “On the 24th, we make 65 pigs in one day,” she added.

I’d be inclined to buy as many myself after a bite of El Cuñao’s pork. The rib was dripping in fat and oil, but so fresh and succulent I could not put it down once I’d started. The pork was tender, not a hair overcooked (which is a tough thing to pull off because the parts of the pig cook at an uneven pace). And there was a thin layer of fat just underneath the chewy skin, reminding me of a pork belly dish I like back home in Brooklyn. That one costs $20, of course. El Cuñao’s was $5, and came with a side.

El Cuñao’s staff members say their pigs are raised locally, a fact proudly splashed across a sign outside the restaurant. This has become a delicate issue of late for Puerto Ricans, with more lechoneras importing pigs from the mainland because they are cheaper. Locals complain that the mainland pig’s diet is not the same, but that’s debatable. The local pork is certainly fresher — and local food is better for the island’s economy, given Puerto Rico’s dependence on imports.

Local or not, adult pigs are the rule at Puerto Rican lechoneras. They weigh somewhere between 90 and 100 pounds, a weight that castrated males achieve in a short three to four months.

Mr. Ayala was right. Guavate was a big old mess, but a glorious one. The booze, the music, the dancing — and those pigs! Great, big rotisserie pigs everywhere you turned, the crowds lining up, their paper plates sagging under the weight of all that glistening pork, the smell of charcoal filling the air.

The traditional way to prepare lechón is over natural wood charcoal, but given Guavate’s crowds and a recent government regulation on wood charcoal use, gas ovens are gaining in popularity. Most of the lechoneras roast the pigs off-site, so more than likely the heavenly smell in Guavate comes from the charcoal placed under the pig to keep it warm.

Mr. Ayala and I started at El Rancho Original, one of the big-boy operations. Most of the lechoneras serve the food cafeteria style, and everyone talks and points their way through.

In line in front of me, Edna Pagán overheard me turning down rice, and swung around with a big grin, wagging her finger in my face. “But you want pork, right? Because if you come here and you don’t eat pork...” she said, cutting off mid-sentence.

Later, I hunted her down. “Oh! Well, you know,” Ms. Pagán said, “then you’re not in the mood. Look at her,” she said, pointing at a friend with mock disdain. “She’s eating turkey.” She meant the pavochón, a rotisserie turkey done in the lechón style. (It’s terrific, actually.)

The traditional adobo, or seasoning, for Puerto Rican lechón is just salt, pepper, oregano, garlic and sometimes ajíes dulces, also called cachuchas or ajicitos, which are small sweet cooking peppers that look something like Scotch bonnets.

It sounds simple, but it’s enough to bring Ms. Pagán and her girlfriends back every Sunday. It’s not uncommon for them to stay long enough to eat twice. They couldn’t get out, anyway. The traffic jams lock them in.

The pig was tasty at El Rancho Original, if a touch dry. We picked at fresh, boiled chunks of purple yautía and shiny, white yuca and watched the thumping scene on the dance floor. I looked out back and blinked — seemingly out of nowhere, the restaurant had a storybook garden, with children hopping in a brook while families picnicked under cabanas.

The party in Guavate seemed to have no social boundaries. Everyone was there — gay, straight, families, retired couples, single girls, college boys. The only things missing were tourists. I did find two people from New York, who were Puerto Rican. The two, Cynthia Martinez and Ernie Torres, routinely hit Guavate when they visit her family in Ponce. “It’s a big tradition for the Puerto Ricans here,” Ms. Martinez said. “This is where you find the true Puerto Ricans — the ultimate hicks. They’re called jíbaros.”

Down the street at La Reliquia, which claims to be Guavate’s first lechonera, an older couple swung around a green dance floor to live guaracha music. The crowd was mesmerized — they must have been in their 70s, but he was nimble as a schoolboy, and she, with her salty hair tied back into a neat bun, was stunning.

Later, I asked them how long they had been married. Esteban López said “51 years” before his wife, Carmen, tapped him on the shoulder and whispered something in Spanish. He corrected himself: “52, on Feb. 19.”

They had been coming to La Reliquia for seven years, they explained. Mr. Ayala spoke with them in Spanish, then lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “They used to go to El Cuñao for many years, but Cuñao doesn’t have live music. They have, what you call it, the jukebox. They know all the places around.”

They knew their pork, too, because La Reliquia’s almost stacked up to El Cuñao’s. There was a selection of side dishes as well, like mondongo, stewed tripe in tomato sauce; a Dominican mofongo, called mangú, made with boiled green plantains that are mashed with sautéed onions and oil; arañitas, or deep-fried green plantains; and green, unripe bananas. The bananas are usually served boiled, but these were tossed with olive oil, vinegar, onions, olives and peppers.

By late afternoon, the party down at El Monte, across the street from El Rancho Original, was positively on fire, its polished dance floor and its observation deck overflowing with dancers. I picked at some pork and bacalao, a salted codfish stew. The pork wasn’t as good as La Reliquia’s, but the place was twice as packed, probably because it is newer.

Or maybe not. On the way up, I had pointed to a new, good-looking lechonera, and Mr. Ayala shook his head dismissively. “It looks fake,” he said.

I never found out what he meant but sure enough it was completely empty when I passed it on the way down. Maybe it’s something only an islander gets, like pizzerias in New York. If you live here long enough, you just kind of know.