Food Feature: Tropical time travel

I'd heard San Juan had become crime-ridden and overrun with tourists from the heavy cruise-ship trade. I'd heard its grand hotels, with their once fabulous casinos, nightclubs and floorshows, were now shabby and vacant. I'd heard poverty was rampant and people were desperate. But I was determined to go anyway. The last time I was in Puerto Rico was 1973, and then it was my home. So when I came across a cheap deal on the Internet last July, my boyfriend and I booked a flight there for the following weekend. What little we took with us was stuffed into a single small bag, but I carried with me a steamer trunk of memories.
Unlike most tourists in San Juan, I wasn't there for the beach. I had old steps to retrace, and they started in the second-oldest city in the Americas: Old San Juan, a fortressed grid of narrow streets crammed full of plazas, churches, statues, fountains, forts and pastel-colored buildings with ornamental ironwork. When I was a teenager, my friends and I spent every Saturday there, wandering the cobblestone streets, rummaging through cheap import shops, cooling off in the dark passageways of old Spanish forts and grabbing lunch at La Hamburgesa, which served a truly misguided concept of a hamburger that we ate anyway because it was a feeble reminder of home.
Finding a suitable place to stay in San Juan isn't easy. Once dotted with small, independent guesthouses, the city is now dominated by Westins and Radissons and such. Most of the hotels are in an area called Isla Verde, where the beaches are nicer and the prices are higher, but I wanted to stay in Old San Juan. An Internet search led us to the Gallery Inn, an 18th century home-turned-hotel owned by a former race horse trainer and his artist wife. A three-tiered maze of rooms filled with tile floors and Spanish Colonial antiques, the hotel's common areas include a music room, complete with a Steinway grand piano, and a library, where framed magazine articles and Bacardi advertisements attest to the jet-setting lifestyle the owners led back in the day. Up top is an open-air deck, offering a view of the ocean, while the ground floor is a labyrinth of courtyards, home to a half-dozen enormous tropical birds, a mini-jungle of exotic plants and zillions of the missus' sculptures of nude busts and faces.
Any trepidation I had about Old San Juan's supposed state of ruin was squelched during our first stroll through the streets. I couldn't get over how immaculate it was. Gone were the litter and grime and suspicious puddles of goo we once obliviously tread through in our bare feet. Gone, too, were the poor, broken-bodied souls who crouched on the church steps, begging for coins in the name of Dios. Today, the polished blue cobblestones, cut from the ballast of Colonial ships, literally shine in the bright Caribbean sun, and many more of the private homes have been restored. The shops have gone upscale; the cruise-ship traffic has brought with it name-brand stores like the Gap and Polo. But there are still some funky import shops, including a few selling JCs, crudely made leather sandals from India so named because they look like shoes Jesus supposedly wore. For American teenage girls living in San Juan in the early 70s, they were the essence of style. As for the beggars, I can only hope the city's apparent prosperity has provided for their care.
I couldn't believe my luck when we stumbled upon El Patio de Sam, a Criolla restaurant I used to frequent 27 years ago. The building has been tarted up a bit with tropical colors, and it now boasts a menu of Kool-Aid-colored frozen drink specials in a bid for cruise-ship dollars, but it still serves a mean dish of rice and beans, as well as a good arroz con pollo and dense, crispy tostones. Our meal there marked the first stop on my epicurean journey down memory lane.
The next day we rented a car for a mere $35 a day. Our ultimate destination was El Yunque, a 28,000-acre rain forest one hour east of San Juan, but I had a few stops to make along the way. We zipped through the Condado, a strip of town that connects Old San Juan to the rest of the city. Formerly the hotbed of San Juan's tourist trade, its once-luxurious hotels are now dingy and seemingly near vacant, and the sidewalks that used to be thick with pedestrians were practically deserted.
Continuing eastward along the ocean, we headed through the residential area of Santurce, stopping for a quick tour of my alma mater, Robinson School, and a drive-by glimpse of my old apartment. Soon we were in Isla Verde, another residential area where the beaches are broad and popular. Recalling the day long ago when the island's first American fast-food restaurant opened (McDonald's, of course), I couldn't get over the volume of Pizza Huts, Dunkin' Donuts, etc., clustered along the way. Popping into the Grand Union grocery store to stock up on provisions, we bought a six-pack of Medallo beer to put on ice and a loaf of pan de agua, a crispy-crusted bread with a soft, chewy center, to snack on.
That bit of business behind us, we headed to Boca de Congrejos, one of the few beaches in San Juan not backed by towering high-rises. On the weekends, this place is party central for locals, who pack the many open-air restaurants and bars constructed of cinder blocks and tin roofs. To truly appreciate the culinary delicacies to be had in rural Puerto Rico, visitors can't be squeamish. Except at finer establishments in San Juan, restaurant sanitation ratings are pretty well non-existent, and it's a common sight to see birds and dogs scavenging the floor for crumbs. Having arrived too early to eat, we headed through Los Piñones, a thick pine forest along the ocean, toward the town of Luisa. Lean-tos selling tourist trinkets (curiously, Puerto Rico is a good place to buy Haitian folk art) dot the road, as do kiosks, where women fry pasteles (cheese or meat turnovers) and baccalao (cod fish fritters) over open fires. We stopped and had one of each, relishing their crisp, greasy textures.
Zipping through the sadly squalid town of Luisa, we headed to the dense, tropical jungles of El Yunque. Winding up and down and around the peaked mountains, we made the requisite stops at the viewing tower and the roadside waterfall before reaching a dead-end (damage from Hurricanes Hugo and Georges have made the road impassable at its highest peak), where we took a footpath into the canopied forest and reveled in the enormous ferns and the symphony of bird songs that filled the air.
Before long, we headed back down the mountains, stopping along the way at another string of kiosks where I bought bags of thick, sweet coconut candy made with huge chunks of the fresh fruit to take back home. Then we drove to the small town of Fajardo, where we bought sno-cones made with hand-chipped ice from a street vendor. A fresh fish dinner from a roadside restaurant wrapped up our gastronomical tour before we headed back to our hotel.
The next morning, we wandered the streets of Old San Juan for a couple of hours and took a quick tour through the Spanish fort San Cristobal before heading to the airport for our flight home. I tried hard those last few hours to absorb all the sights and sounds and sensations I could, to take back home with me. There was so much more I wanted to see — Los Piles, a natural water slide down a rocky creek deep in the mountains, and Phosphorescent Bay, where micro-organisms make the water glow in the moonlight — but our time was up.
San Juan may not be the glamorous, shining jewel of the Caribbean that it once was, but its rich history and tropical beauty still have the power to charm those willing to look beyond its shabby corners and beach-front high-rises. I'll definitely be back. I still have steps that need retracing.
The Gallery Inn is located at Calle Norzagaray No. 204, Old San Juan. 787-722-1808. El Patio de Sam is located at 102 San Sebastian. 787-723-1149. For cheap car rentals, call Charlie Car Rental, 787-728-2418. For tourism information, call 800-223-6530 or visit www.prtourism.com.
suzanne.v@creativeloafing.com