El Taino

"My dream come true." That's how Maria Parrilla describes El Taino, the Puerto Rican restaurant she opened four years ago to give local islanders a taste of the foods of their native home, and to introduce island cooking to the uninitiated. What is Puerto Rican cooking? It combines Caribbean, African, Indian, and European foods and seasonings, reflecting a melding of cultures.

That means plenty of fried and baked meats, especially chicken and pork, as well as seafoods like conch, red snapper, and king fish. It means lots of plantains: served mashed with garlic and oil, or fried into chips, or grated and wrapped around meat and beans. And it means delicious tropical juices and nectars.

It can be heavy, filling food -- starchy root vegetables, rice and beans, deep-fried pork belly thickly rimmed with fat -- or light and healthful, like boiled lobster, baked chicken, and sauteed shrimp in a tremendously flavorful sauce of red wine, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers. Parrilla, a Puerto Rico native, cooked these foods as a teenager with her mother and late grandmother. Those kitchen memories "are like Thanksgiving dinners -- unity," she said. "We'd cook these big meals, and that usually meant a lot of us were at home having a lot to do with the process. That's our culture."

It's also the culture she created at El Taino, named after Puerto Rico's indigenous Indians. She hires cooks with little or no experience so she can teach them to prepare her family specialties exactly as her family prepared them. That my-way-or-the-highway policy pays off in dishes like pernil asado ($8.95), a tender slow-roasted pork shoulder marinated in garlic, onion powder, and a blend of Caribbean seasonings known as sofrito, then served atop iceberg lettuce and tomatoes. The lean, aromatic meat is pork at its finest.
-By Sacha Pfeiffer