Aliyya Swaby Photo
Juan Diaz, a onetime radio and TV journalist in Santo Domingo, brought a sense of performance to the kitchen as he fried green plantain to make mofongo.
Diaz and his business partner America Rivera said they worried about failure when they opened El Fogón — “stove,” in Spanish — in the shell of once-beloved Peruvian restaurant Machu Picchu at 101 Farren Ave. in the Annex.
A month and a half later, they’re working on boosting their “fusion Latina” or Latin-fusion menu with creative meals and homemade recipes, to draw in people from all countries who want to try something familiar or new.
Diaz learned how to cook on the job when he moved to Florida from the Dominican Republic 12 years ago and got a job at a club that just happened to need a chef. “No cocinaba nada,” he said. “I hadn’t cooked anything.” His peers taught him how to make Cuban food, especially popular in Florida.
When he moved to New York three years later, his cuisine had to hop one and two islands over to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. “Poco a poco,” little by little, his skills improved and people responded enthusiastically.
His customers here in New Haven love the mofongo, a typical Puerto Rican dish with a fried green-plantain base, which Diaz “adapted and transformed into the focal dish” at El Fogón.
El Fogón offers a selection of eight types of mofongo, some with meat, some with seafood, and one vegetarian version with cheese. Recently Diaz made a mofongo de chicharrón — pork skins that are boiled, dried, seasoned and deep fried — which at $9 is one of the least expensive varieties.
He cut up two green plantains, then tossed them in the deep fryer for five minutes. While waiting, he heated up garlic, butter and salt in a pot on the stove — a sauce to soften the plantain and make sure the fried pieces were not too “áspero” or “rough.”
The process of opening the restaurant took them five months, a long time, Diaz said. He worried that after almost a half year of planning and bureaucratic tape, no one would show up to eat his food. But he was surprised by “the support from the community” once the restaurant finally opened.
Likely, the prior success of Machu Picchu helped draw customers back to the space, Diaz said. “They’re used to Machu Picchu.”
El Fogón already has some regulars, Rivera said. She used to be a stay-at-home mom, which she called “depressing” at times, especially when her kids were older and she was home alone. Now, while Diaz runs the kitchen, Rivera manages the front of the restaurant, where she gets to know people from all around New Haven.
As the plantain fried, Diaz cut up a few strips of crunchy chicharrón into inch-long bits, preparing to put it in “un solo envase,” one single container, which allows the pork flavor to “penetrate” the plantains.
That container is a traditional Puerto Rican pilón, a tall ceramic mortar with a matching wooden pestle for mashing or grinding. Diaz put the chicharrones and the hot garlic and butter sauce into the mortar.
(He also has a pilón “just for decoration” above the glass casing of food trays — the pestle reads “Chef Diaz” and the mortar reads “El Fogón.”)
Once the plantains finished frying, he poured them scalding-hot into the pilón and mashed it all together for a minute with the pestle. To “decorate” the plate, he chopped up some lettuce, carrots and tomatoes and fanned them around the perimeter.
He packed the mashed plantain, chicharrón and garlic into a small bowl, then overturned the bowl on a plate. Not his most beautiful mofongo, he said, but still hearty and flavorful.
He poured a thin, creamy sauce with a condensed milk base over the mound. The recipe for that, he said, is an El Fogón secret, likely one of many culinary inventions Diaz will create as his business continues to grow.
Sounds tasty. Good luck to them. Can't wait to try. But how was it they had to endure 5 months of bureaucratic red tape to open? That's no good.