Food in Old San Juan

Puerto Rico is a great place for tropical fruits and juices. Every street has a shop that sells freshly squeezed fruit juice in various forms i.e. shakes, frappes, sorbets. One of the local specialities is Mofungo that consists of mashed green plantain seasoned with garlic and other spices and filled with chicken, fish, meat, vegetables, etc. We found a place that served it and ordered one filled with vegetables. It is such a simple preparation and now that I think about it, there must be similar dishes prepared in Kerala as well where plantains are used liberally.

One of the interesting eateries we visited was Baru. This is a small place that serves Mediterranean-Carribean fusion food. As vegetarians, our options were limited but they also proved to be really interesting. We ordered Almond Chivita which essentially consisted of fried plantain chips served with flavoured goat cheese and garnished with almond chips and seasoning. It was an innovative dish, we thought and quite delicious as well. The we ordered a dish whose name I forget but it was made of fried bell peppers, buffalo mozzarella cheese and seasoned with pesto sauce, olive oil and basil mojito. This was even better than the first dish as the flavours were so well-balanced and as for the Mozzarella, I have never eaten a better kind. When the waiter brought the dish, we were taken aback to see two huge wedges of white cheese placed between the peppers and expected that it’d be really rich. But it was the lightest, freshest and nicest Mozzarella that we ever had. Its consistency was like home-made cottage cheese, only softer. The last thing we ordered was asparagus risotto and again, it surpassed our expectations. The risotto was excellently cooked, it had lots of vegetables and the Alfredo sauce was so light and well-flavoured…. such a far cry from the Italian food served in the States that settles in your tummy and just… stays there. No pics, sad to say…:-(

Another place that I had marked out to visit was Cafe Berlin since I read someplace that they had good vegetarian options (It is something we ALWAYS have to check!). As we got busier towards the end of our trip, I thought we’d have to ditch the plan since I didn’t even know where this place was. Voila, en route to San Cristobal, Cafe Berlin appeared. A very nice little place, they had amazing vegetarian food, a very chilled-out ambience and great music! Plus an interesting painting on the wall…:-) What did we order? Freshly squeezed pineapple juice (it was fabulous!), hummus and bread (excellent) and spinach-zucchini lasagne (wonderful). It has been a long time since food felt so immensely satisfying. Both of us felt so good, so generous, so expansive, we gave a tip of 20%. Really nice place.

We ran into a Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream parlour that was run by an American lady who used to be an ex-Olympic gymnast. She had done up the place very innovatively with newspaper cuttings, photographs, concert posters, bright pictures, etc. Pinch and I shared a Baklava flavoured waffle cone and it was the best ice-cream I had eaten in a long, long time! Pinch is not a fan of ice cream at all (Too sweet, too large a portion) but he loved this one.

Lastly, talking about dessert, we had a Guava cheesecake in another eatery called Barrachina’s. Delicately flavoured with the faintest taste of guava, it was quite nice.

Seafood lovers can rejoice. PR serves up various seafood items cooked in the local flavours.