{"id":78617,"date":"2019-04-02T09:57:49","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T14:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/?p=78617"},"modified":"2019-04-02T16:44:44","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T21:44:44","slug":"meet-chef-roberto-perez-revitalizing-chicagos-puerto-rican-food-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.medill.northwestern.edu\/chicago\/meet-chef-roberto-perez-revitalizing-chicagos-puerto-rican-food-scene\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Chef Roberto P\u00e9rez: Revitalizing Chicago\u2019s Puerto Rican food scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Justin Agrelo<\/strong>
\nMedill Reports<\/em><\/p>\n

Puerto Rican chef Roberto P\u00e9rez doesn\u2019t eat pork.<\/p>\n

He confesses this to me from behind the steering wheel of his black Volvo on a cold Monday a few weeks ago. We\u2019re driving through Chicago\u2019s Austin neighborhood to Rico Fresh, one of P\u00e9rez\u2019s favorite grocery stores.<\/p>\n

His confession is an obvious break from a stale Puerto Rican stereotype that claims we all love pork. As a Puerto Rican who doesn\u2019t eat much pork myself, P\u00e9rez\u2019s views on \u201cthe swine\u201d (as he calls it) don\u2019t surprise me. But because people are defined just as much by choices they abstain from as they are by what they choose to enjoy, I ask him about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWait, why don\u2019t you eat pork?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of what it symbolizes,\u201d he says. \u201cPork is the symbol of the Spanish colonial power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut Puerto Ricans love<\/em> pork,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>Puerto Ricans love<\/em> pork,\u201d he agrees. \u201cAnd I like pork a lot too. I could make some damn good pork. But Puerto Rican cooking is more than pork.\u201d<\/p>\n

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P\u00e9rez\u00a0in his kitchen in his home kitchen in the Austin neighborhood. He is showing me all that goes into one of his cooking classes and meals (Justin Agrelo\/Medill).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And it is this idea\u2014that Puerto Rican cooking is much more than its traditional dishes, much more than typical recipes, much more than contemporary imaginations have allowed it to be\u2014that guides P\u00e9rez\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

P\u00e9rez, 44, is the founder of Urban Pil\u00f3n, a culinary business that offers catering, private dinners, and cooking classes. The main goals of his classes are to teach people how to make Puerto Rican food with fresher, more natural ingredients while also expanding their ideas about what Puerto Rican food can be. P\u00e9rez sees Urban Pil\u00f3n as a vehicle to help revitalize Chicago\u2019s Puerto Rican food scene–a scene he sees as stuck in the past.<\/p>\n

One look at his Instagram and you\u2019ll see his vision put into practice. It\u2019s full of dishes you won\u2019t find at any Puerto Rican restaurant in town. Dishes like shrimp in creole sauce on cassava dumplings or taro root bread pudding with coconut. He recently hosted a dinner with a menu made entirely of \u00a0Puerto Rican dishes from the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

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These fried plantains will be used to make monfongo, a traditional Puerto Rican dish. Perez mixes them with boiled yuca to add texture and an update to the dish (Justin Agrelo\/Medill).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What his Instagrams won\u2019t tell you is that P\u00e9rez never planned on being a chef. He was born in West Town, but like many other Puerto Ricans in Chicago<\/a>, he was gentrified out of the neighborhood where he grew up. He attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, studied political science and figured he\u2019d become a politician. \u201cYou know, I wanted to change society\u2019s problems and so I thought that politics might be it,\u201d he says. \u201cI learned the hard way it wasn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Urban Pil\u00f3n is the amalgamation of several food-related experiences that were happening in his life all around the same time.<\/p>\n

In 2012, P\u00e9rez\u2019s son got sick and needed to stick to a strict diet. This forced him to have to learn how to cook meals he had never made before. It also shifted everything he thought about food. He found himself reading labels and researching ingredients with weird names\u2014something he had never done before. \u201cI was not going to make something that was going to make him sick,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t want any gray area.\u201d<\/p>\n

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P\u00e9rez mixes fried plantains and boiled yuca using the pil\u00f3n–a pestle and mortar–as he makes one of his signature mofongos (Justin Agrelo\/Medill).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reading food labels quickly became a habit. He soon realized many of the iconic, commercial seasonings such as saz\u00f3n and adodo that he and other Latinx people grew up eating are stuffed with artificial ingredients and additives.<\/p>\n

\u201cSaz\u00f3n, that little orange packet, has yellow and red dye in it,\u201d he says. \u201cThose food dyes in a lot of European countries are prohibited. It\u2019s against the law and it\u2019s become part of our diet. It\u2019s pretty scary.\u201d<\/p>\n

P\u00e9rez also realized that he liked cooking — a lot. It slowly grew from a chore life had forced on him into a full-blown passion. He began reading cookbooks, following food blogs, researching chefs and studying their techniques, watching YouTube videos, pulling wisdom from older people in his life, and traveling around the Caribbean and Latin America in search of inspiration.<\/p>\n

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P\u00e9rez scoops out the insides of a Caribbean avocado and adds it to a side salad (Justin Agrelo\/Medill).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Around this time P\u00e9rez was also searching for the best mofongo in Chicago, but couldn\u2019t find a restaurant that served one he thought was good enough. After surveying several Puerto Rican restaurants in town, P\u00e9rez began to feel as though he was reading the same menu over and over again.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s clich\u00e9, clich\u00e9 meals in Chicago,\u201d he says. \u201cYou go to any [Puerto Rican] restaurant and you\u2019re going to see the same clich\u00e9 things,” he says. “You\u2019re going to see arroz con gandules. It\u2019s good, but there\u2019s also 20-something different ways to make rice.\u201d<\/p>\n

He began to get frustrated. Not only by his inability to find an amazing mofongo, but also by what he saw as a lack of innovation and creativity within Chicago\u2019s Puerto Rican restaurants.<\/p>\n

Then one day he was parked in front of his son\u2019s school, talking on the phone with his friend Angel. They realized they both shared these same frustrations. \u201cWe felt like [Puerto Rican food] did not evolve in Chicago. And we were like \u2018f**k it then. We\u2019re going to have to do it ourselves.\u2019 And so that\u2019s where Urban Pil\u00f3n was born.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The dish P\u00e9rez and I make at his house. It’s sea bass topped with a creole sauce, stuffed with grilled shrimp, and a side of mofongo de yuca, all on a banana leaf and an edible flower (Justin Agrelo\/Medill).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

P\u00e9rez says he feels a lot of these restaurants are \u201cstuck in the 80s.” That their menus haven’t seemed to have changed much over time and many of them serve the same traditional Puerto Rican dishes. Perez travels to Puerto Rico often to visit his mom who lives in Ponce or to perform with his band, Bomba con Buya.\u00a0 He says the restaurants in Puerto Rico are much more innovative and creative than the Puerto Rican restaurants in Chicago.<\/p>\n

“If you had the chance to eat in Puerto Rico, then you realize that things are going good,” he says. “But I don\u2019t think that for Chicago. Maybe it\u2019s because we\u2019re in the diaspora. Maybe it\u2019s the distance. But I don\u2019t think [Puerto Rican food in Chicago has] evolved” the way it has in Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n

Puerto Rican food historian Cruz Miguel Ort\u00edz-Cuadra is the author of the book Eating Puerto Rico,<\/em> which chronicles the history of food and eating habits of Puerto Ricans.<\/p>\n

Ort\u00edz-Cuadra agrees that being in the diaspora has had a real impact on Puerto Rican food in Chicago. He says the menus in Chicago\u2019s Puerto Rican restaurants seem like they haven\u2019t changed much over time because of the interconnected relationship between food and identity.<\/p>\n

\u201cIdentity isn\u2019t something fixed,\u201d he says. \u201cFood is an identity builder. [Chicago] Puerto Ricans, although they weren\u2019t born in Puerto Rico, they still feel they are Puerto Rican… [they] use food as an identity builder or as a connector to the past\u2014to their parents or grandparents.\u201d<\/p>\n

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P\u00e9rez searching through the cabinets in his kitchen. When Urban Pil\u00f3n first started, P\u00e9rez used to host cooking classes out of this kitchen (Justin Agrelo\/Medill).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ort\u00edz-Cuadra says many Puerto Ricans who are born and raised in the U.S. may experience a loss of Puerto Rican national identity. Cooking the same, iconic dishes becomes a tool for Puerto Ricans in the U.S. mainland to claim and assert their ethnic identity in a country where they constantly have to negotiate if they are Puerto Rican or not.<\/p>\n

Memory and nostalgia also play an important role in these conventional menus, according to Ort\u00edz-Cuadra. Puerto Ricans in Chicago want to eat foods they grew up with but may not always want to (or even know how to) cook these foods themselves. These restaurants provide a space to satisfy that longing.<\/p>\n

In many ways, these iconic Puerto Rican dishes are symbols of resilience and cultural preservation\u2014foods that have withstood the forces of migration and assimilation in an erasure-prone-city like Chicago.<\/p>\n