Hello everyone. Sorry to have been gone for so long. I am in the middle of a giant, short deadline project, came down with the world’s worst cold/sinus infection and in the midst of it all, went to Puerto Rico for a few days.

It was our first visit there. I’ll put up a post with photos of what we did later this week, but wanted to share the food now. Overall, I was not a fan (sorry PR!). A lot of the food is fried and much of it was bland. There is a lot of seafood, but I didn’t have anything that really wowed me.  The whole red snapper was probably the best thing we had. It’s cooked whole though, which I’m not a fan of. Served with fried plantains. It was moist and very fresh.

We ate lunch at a place recommended to us where we ended up sitting at a

counter. Like most restaurants, we had to point to what we wanted since we couldn’t pronounce the Spanish and our server didn’t understand the English. I had mofongo (mashed green plantains) stuffed with chicken. That was pretty good. It came with rice and beans of course. And some whole pieces of plantain.

Another adventure was dinner at a Spanish restaurant (Barrachina) where Teen Martha and I shared seafood paella. I enjoyed it, but there were pieces of shell throughout, making it hard to eat.

Many restaurants outside San Juan are in kiosks on the beach. We ate at two of these places with mixed results. At one of them I ordered crab stew, which is made with a land crab. I really did not care for this. The crab tasted very earthy and pungent to me – it

definitely tasted like a land crab! It was served with mofongo and a little salad that was cute, but came with bottled dressing.

For breakfast one day, I had what is called a mallorca, a yellow dough with ham and cheese inside. I enjoyed this, but like everything, it was just bland. I needed something – mustard or a sauce to bring it to life.

One local item I wanted to try but we did not is lechon, whole roast suckling pig. We saw numerous tents on the roadside selling this, but I could not bring myself to eat at them (hygiene concerns). On our last day we asked the concierge where to go to enjoy this. She was less than helpful, first saying you would not eat it for dinner because it has been on the spit all day and gets old (which I think cannot be true since I’ve been to pig roasts and it does take all day for that pig to cook). She then recommended only 2 places that were each an hour away. So that didn’t happen.

Overall, the food was just not a hit for us. We had fun though and I’ll share what we did in a later post.

Hello everyone. Sorry to have been gone for so long. I am in the middle of a giant, short deadline project, came down with the world’s worst cold/sinus infection and in the midst of it all, went to Puerto Rico for a few days. It was our first visit there. I’ll put up a post … Read more →