We try to provide them with a tiny bit of what's in their island. In my thoughts, I would say, "One day, that corner will be mine." I got the chance to do it, so I made the decision, and here we are: Jibaritos y Más.Ī lot of our customers have been in the United States for 20, 30 years, and they've never been able to return to Puerto Rico. Ever since I got to this country, my first job was working at a Puerto Rican cuisine restaurant, and I loved the whole process and the dishes.ĭuring my commute, I would pass this place, this corner, the restaurant at the corner here. I was born in Venezuela, but my heart is split in two my heart is half Venezuelan and half Puerto Rican. Other, nonfried dishes made-to-order, such as the annatto-tinged chicken soup bobbing with silky pieces of leg and thigh, are also at odds with a takeout model.Yelitza: I'm Venezuelan. Often overlooked dishes like the pollo frito, an unbattered, shatteringly crispy leg-thigh combo, or the mofongo, dense orbs of garlicky chicharrón-larded mashed plantain, reveal their true textural dimensions when eaten on the spot. The cuchifrito game in general at both locations is extraordinary. There’s no longer a legitimate reason to snuff out a perfectly executed jibarito in a Styrofoam coffin. Not just jibaritos, but all of the classic Puerto Rican comida criolla funded a third expansion in January when they opened a dining room next door to HQ. Jibaritos y Mas Credit: JEFF MARINI FOR CHICAGO READER Don’t bother trying to phone in an order at noon. Nevertheless, there aren’t too many tables at the original location, and the frenetic takeout business they do there abides. It nearly doesn’t matter what you choose to fill it with-roast pork, chicken, ham and cheese, octopus, blood sausage a plate, with a side of arroz con gandules, and a half-inch stack of paper napkins is the only civilized delivery system for the jibarito.
Like the mothership, the place does a thrumming takeout business, but “the real experience is when you eat it at the moment,” he says, just after the plantain has been bisected to order, deep fried, smashed flat, and fried again. You have to attack it.”įrom left: Arroz con gandules, pollo frito, lechon con arroz blanco Credit: JEFF MARINI FOR CHICAGO READERĪrrieta, who runs the family’s second spot, Jibaritos on Harlem in Dunning on the very western edge of the city, says a lot of people don’t get this-or don’t care. “You gotta hold it with your two hands and don’t be scared of it. “You have to get dirty,” says Jesus Arrieta, Rivera’s son, who enlisted with his mother four years ago when she opened Jibaritos y Mas at the corner of Fullerton and Kimball, the footprint of a nascent jibarito empire. Like all the other native-born icons in Chicago’s sandwich canon-the Italian beef, the pork chop sandwich, the gym shoe-the jibarito or “little hillbilly,” is an ungainly mess, and there’s only one way to eat it to fully appreciate its potential. The fillings were foreign: shaved bistec, shredded iceberg, tomato, mayo, and American cheese. When she found work at a food stall in the now-erased Mega Mall in Logan Square, jibaritos were on the menu, as they were in nearly every Puerto Rican restaurant in town by that time (though they hadn’t proliferated anywhere else-not even on the island). See, her hometown in northwest Venezuela is the birthplace of the patacón Maracucho, a sandwich of strikingly similar construction, best eaten when the starchy green bananas are still hot and crispy from the fryer, and you’re in the right frame of mind and physical circumstances to negotiate the unstable strata within. Figueroa at the late great Borinquen Restaurant. It was the jibarito, the mojo-slicked pressed plantain sandwich invented in Humboldt Park by Juan C. Yelitza Rivera made at least one easy adjustment after she left Maracaibo, Venezuela, almost 20 years ago.
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