Is America’s best restaurant in Puerto Rico?
Bacoa has been described as “seriously one of the most special restaurants in America” (Credit: Richard Morgan)
Such rustic whimsy is the heart of the restaurant’s rough-and-ready charm. “Bacoa is the type of restaurant everyone wants to run and the type of restaurant everyone wants to eat at because it’s such fulfilling cooking,” said Sin. “Because they’re cooking primarily for locals, they don’t have to cook through the lens of outsiders who don’t know the culture.”
“Most people call Bacoa a glorified chinchorro and I like it that way,” said Marichal. “For us, keeping it casual is part of the greatness.”
Bacoa’s continuation and re-popularisation of burén cooking is a win for Puerto Rico and its tourists, according to the most venerated chef on the island, María Dolores de Jesús, who runs a burén restaurant of mostly pre-contact Taíno dishes. “I feel very satisfied to see younger generations connect with older traditions and older realities, older truths,” she told me.
On my visit, I gorged on morcilla (blood sausage) sandwiches and cod fritters served with “crack” ketchup (lifted by cilantro and slow-cooked garlic), along with gulps of crab funche, a grits-like stew, and crunches of chicharrón (fried pig skin) with citrus horseradish gremolata. I scribbled a note at dinner: “Bacoa puts the epic in epicurean.”
Chefs René Marichal, Xavier Pacheco and Raúl Correa opened Bacoa in 2019 (Credit: Bacoa/Rafael N Ruíz Mederos)
It will probably be the most perfect whole fish you’ve ever eaten because they’re so intentional about technique and ingredients
Despite Puerto Rico’s second-class status as a US colony, Correa sees Bacoa as an act of culinary equality. “In the mainland, you go to Houston and there’s a cuisine. You go to Seattle and there’s a cuisine. Why should Puerto Rico be any different?” he asked. “We want to experience what everyone else is experiencing, too.”
Correa has been inspired by yoghurt-marinated lamb in Tel Aviv. Marichal by lamb skewers on a recent visit to Kochi, the Michelin-starred Korean restaurant in New York. And Pacheco by simple bread with tomato in Barcelona. For a while, Bacoa served fried rennet, typically a Brazilian dish.
“We get flavours and techniques from all over the world. That doesn’t mean our food is global,” said Marichal. “It’s Puerto Rican with an education. It’s Puerto Rican with a passport, with a life in the 21st Century. We just want to get away from what people usually think.”
Dishes such as beetroot with walnut and cucumbers and roasted pumpkin dip with pickled peppers are designed to celebrate Puerto Rico (Credit: Bacoa/Rafael N Ruíz Mederos)
That character was exemplified in the green plantain tostones served with dewy dollops of caviar that I wolfed down, a frequent appetiser at Bacoa that began when María Mercedes Grubb, another prominent Puerto Rican chef, kept bringing tubs of the delicacy for her hangout sessions with Bacoa’s chefs – what she called “the perfect setup”.
Grubb flagged that chickens, coconuts, plantains, pigs and rice are all invasive species. “When people say ‘Puerto Rican’, what do they mean?” she asked. “Or what do they think they mean? If you want to have a conversation about authenticity, it will be over a meal of fish and yucca and that’s about it. People need to take authenticity with a grain of salt and realise there’s so much more [to Puerto Rican cuisine] than mofongo.”
For me, Bacoa’s power lies in its approach to the traveller’s quixotic quest for connection despite fleeting itineraries. The day of my visit, I had made plans for later that evening, but as hours passed, my interest in being elsewhere dwindled and then vanished, like a romance.
As my afternoon with Cofresi tipped into night, swirls of cigar smoke added to the sense that this was gastronomic Brigadoon, a once-in-a-lifetime meal for me and a Sunday for him. I wondered: what if the best US restaurant is in the Puerto Rican rainforest?
“I can’t believe this place is real,” I told Pacheco, as the island’s tiny iconic tree frogs, the coquis, sang their signature lullaby from the moonlit woods around us.
“Bacoa is an idea but it’s also real,” Pacheco replied. “If that makes you confused or uncomfortable, that’s OK. Have fun going back in time to a year when you would be more comfortable. But the future is for us. And I can tell you a secret: the present is for us, too.”