In those early days of our immigration (so the story goes), we Dominicans had no restaurants. There were no Caridads, no Malecons, no chimichurri trucks anywhere in sight. The first of us survived primarily on other people’s larders. On NY street food, on Puerto Rican fritura, on Cuban black beans. The street stuff—the hot dogs, the hamburgers, the pizza—was worth bragging about on visits to the Island, but nothing you could hang a life on. As for the Cuban and Puerto Rican grub—familiar, yes, but when you’re a thousand miles from home, cut off from your cultural and ancestral ley lines—and dying for a taste of mangú—not familiar enough.
Been 40 years since those bad old days, and much has changed for us Dominicans, especially in New York. Where before we were a couple thousand souls scattered throughout the five boroughs, today we’re nearly a million strong in the greater metropolitan area, the majority concentrated in upper Manhattan (or El Alto, as it is known in Spanish). Starting at 135th Street on the west side and running all the way into Washington Heights and Inwood, Alto Manhattan is to the Dominican community what Miami is to Cubans, what the LES and El Barrio used to be to Puerto Ricans—the Ground Zero of our New Jerusalem, the place we settled most successfully in the wake of our diaspora. It’s here where we achieved the condition that must have seemed unimaginable to our first sojourners: density. Density: not great for childhood or privacy, but wonderful for community and of course for the appetite. The “forefathers” might have lived off other people’s larders, but that’s not something their children have to worry about. We actually have the opposite problem. If you’re in upper Manhattan and can’t score a decent taste of Dominican cooking, either you’re trying real hard to screw up, or something’s very wrong with your luck. The trouble is not finding good spots but simply trying to decide which ones to choose.
I’m not exaggerating: Up here in the Alto there are hundreds upon hundreds of opportunities to eat like a true-blue Dominican. If you just want to indulge in the basics, what we Dominicans call la bandera—“the flag,” our national dish of rice, brown beans, and some kind of chicken or steak—there are plenty of places that will oblige with pleasure (and oversize campo servings). The Caridad restaurants have the best reputation for la bandera. There are dozens of Caridads throughout New York and everybody has their own favorite. My editor-writer friend Juleyka swears by the one up on Broadway and 184th Street. Silvio Torres-Saillant, don of Dominican studies, insists that the one on St. Nicholas and 191st is the best. They don’t try to be Dominican, he tells me. They just are. Me, I’m partial to the Caridad on Broadway and 145th Street. Great counter service, a sweet pollo guisado, and the tostones are cut thin and fried to a golden bisque.
But if you’re looking for la bandera plus the best rotisserie chicken in all of upper Manhattan—El Malecon is the place for you. Unlike Miami Cubans with their Versailles, the Dominican community doesn’t really have one “It” restaurant. El Malecon comes pretty damn close, though. It’s where you’ll sometimes run into famous Dominican ballplayers (a Manny or a D. Ortíz or an Alfonso Soriano) and our beloved musicians (I’ve seen one of the Aventura boys there). Up on Broadway and 175th, not far from the George Washington Bridge Bus Station, it’s the joint with all the glass and the waiters that ain’t always from the DR. (That’s when you know you’ve made it: when you can hire other ethnic groups to slave for you.) Be prepared: El Malecon at mealtimes is a frenzy: a Kalahari watering hole of old-school Domos, new-school Domos, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, EMT workers, cheap-rent hipsters, and doctors from Columbia-Presbyterian. But if you want to see the real El Malecon, visit after midnight. When everyone is returning from a dance, a party, a drive, a long stretch of work. Past midnight is when you will see the community best. When all the impediments fall away and the X-ray of who we are is almost perfect. And yes, no matter what, order the vaunted rotisserie chicken. Sometimes you’ll catch a bad bird and it will be dry—well, my friends, dust off the middle-school Spanish and send it back for another. The juicy ones are worth enduring the rolled eyes of the servers and your inability to conjugate querer properly; the juicy ones, you see, are divine. (A lot of my friends are convinced that El Malecon’s best days are over. They’re all about Rancho Jubilee and La Casa del Mofongo. I like these restaurants well enough, but neither of them has that chicken.)
But if we’re talking about who does what best in the Dominican community, we need to talk about Margot. Margot Restaurant is on Broadway and 159th; it doesn’t look like jack, but no one in the tristate area does better standards. Their rice, their beans, their gandules, their pollo guisado, their sancocho are all cooked to island perfection, and they always have my favorite burned-rice delicacy—concon—which in my sureño mind is the essence of Dominican comida casera. Margot’s is so addictive that people from the Bronx and Brooklyn will pay for cab service just so they can get her sancocho delivered to their door. That’s how slamming they cook at Margot.
But focus too much on restaurants and we’ll miss what’s best about the upper Manhattan eating experience: the street food. This, in my mind, is what distinguishes El Alto, what makes it singular: Of all the communities in Manhattan, no one else is throwing down the quantity or quality of street cuisine that Dominicans are throwing down. It’s on some Rise-of-David-Levinsky-type level. (That’s when as a community you know you’ve made it: When you’ve got as many people selling good grub on the streets as you do inside the restaurants.) A couple months ago I was standing on the corner of Dyckman and Seaman, waiting for my cousin Manny to join me for dinner. Washington Heights was doing its amazing spring thing. Crazy stunting. So many kids in baseball uniforms you would have thought we were in an earlier America. And the food vendors everywhere. Pushing weary shopping carts loaded with coolers and jugs. Wrestling napkins around their tasty products. Sometimes working in pairs, sometimes alone. Baseball caps, fanny packs, trailing the smell of fritura. A constant flow of street-food vendors, and even though I’m going to a “nice” place for dinner, I can’t resist. I buy a kipe, an alcapurria, and a pastelito de pollo in quick succession; if I’d been less disciplined I would have had a yaniqueque and a couple of pieces of pork chicharrón as well, but that would have put an end to dinner. Gulped down a glass of tamarind juice (which has the reputation in my country of making you sleepy). Could have had parcha, but men are not supposed to drink parcha (another saying). One of the sisters even had mabí, the original Taino root beer! (Your bodies are gone, ancestors, but not your recipes.) I’m a glutton for mabí, so I drank that too. Was not as good as I’m used to, but still.
The best of these vendors do bang-out business, summer and winter. The kipe man pulled out a wad of bills that would have made even Juvenile blush. They trawl the salons, bodegas, barbershops; they patrol the baseball games, the picnics, the parks, have their territories, their corners, their schedules. And as usual: Everybody I know has a favorite. My ex-girl will not buy a pastelito from anybody but this dude Seguidillo, whose reputation in the Heights is legendary. My current girl’s aunt is a street vendor famous for putting the most meat into her pastelitos. When the fam tried to convince her to cut back in order to increase her profits, she refused, claiming her customers expected no less from her. (I’ve actually tasted these pastelitos: delicious, of course, but more like calzones than fritura.) For majarete, my boy Pedro swears by La Vieja de Las Arepas, up on 181st and St. Nicholas. At Easter she also dishes up the best habichuelas con dulce this side of the Septentrionales (though there are at least three other women who lay claim to the title).
The largest and least mobile of the pushcarts are the chimichurri trucks. Another staple of upper Manhattan. You’ve seen them. Dour lunch wagons with compensatory neon cladding and squashy tires. Most serve the chimichurri—the Dominican answer to the hamburger—or the friquitaqui—the Dominican answer to the sloppy joe. But some of these places are their very own little restaurants serving the bandera and other standards. (There used to be this repurposed yellow school bus across from the Polo Grounds projects that served a mean goat, sureño style. Where have you gone, yellow bus?) For chimichurris, the consensus is that El Peluche on Tenth and 204th is best. But I’ve always liked the chicharrón and batatas from the chimichurri truck that parks alongside the American Academy of Arts and Letters (155th and Broadway). Not far from where Ralph Ellison is buried. He might have appreciated the yams (I yam what I yam), but I’m not sure he would have liked the company. (From what his biography suggests, he and his wife weren’t big on us Latin types.)
In any event: At the gustatory level, we Domos have upper Manhattan on lock. Hard to walk anywhere without being tempted by something delicious. So much of our grub, such a torrent, it’s almost as if we are afraid to be far from our cuisine, lest we forget it, lest the bad old days return.
Which hunger is this bounty of comida appeasing, I wonder: a hunger in the belly or in the imagination? And in the case of recent immigrants like us, are these the same things?
A food story from the bad old days: It’s 1969 and my father has been in-country only a couple of weeks. Walks into a Cuban restaurant and orders a medio pollo, by which he means a little coffee. The Cuban waiter, not knowing Dominicans, puts half a chicken in front of him, and there my old man is, eyes tearing, with only fifty cents on his person, trying to decide if he should try to explain or run. In the end he ran.
But let’s be honest: Dominican cuisine in upper Manhattan, for all its exuberant quantity, isn’t exactly famous for innovation. Our kitchen talents have been too attached to fidelity, to making food like abuela used to make it, to experiment. Call it immigration—brings out the amber in a culture. Which means that while you can sup on superb mangú y queso frito on nearly any corner of upper Manhattan, it’s almost impossible to score a simple non-Dominican thing like, say, brunch. For that you have to hoof it downtown. Having suffered a long protected period of no-mangú, we Dominicans-reacted by inaugurating an age of nothing-but-mangú. The Law of El Alto for the longest time was: You ate Dominican in-neighborhood; for anything else, you went elsewhere.
Fortunately, a culinary détente seems to be in the making. Steadily and without much pachanga, a cadre of restaurateurs are trying to drop a Douglas Rodriguez on upper Manhattan’s Dominican palate. Trying to hew to their Caribbean culinary roots while embracing innovation, variety, possibility, and, yes, a little thing called brunch.
Café Largo, on Broadway and 137th Street, is the granddaddy of the upstarts. Started out as the one place in the area for those of us who grew up Dominican but who did so inside the United States; the one restaurant in the area where you could order mangú and mimosa, where they served up a brilliant pasta puttanesca alongside a top-notch chicharrón de pollo, where the flan’s so existentially sabroso that people truck in from as far as NJ to get some. (Now, that’s the sign of quality, when you have NJ Cubans traveling into NY for a piece of flan.) After a prolonged hiatus, Café Largo has returned to its former digs and brought along a pair of friends: The raw-brick restaurant is now linked to an immaculate taqueria (which seems to be struggling) and an upscale gourmet store called Vinegar Hill (which does not). Vinegar Hill serves dynamite salads and prepared meals and excellent bread and what I would argue is the second-best uptown pizza, just a point shy of Patsy’s gold standard. Marc Calcano, the handsome, intense master of this empire, grew up in an apartment around the corner from the place. “When I was a kid walking down Broadway,” he said to me while standing in his kitchen, “I always thought my community deserved better. I wanted people in the neighborhood to be able to eat quality and variety. I don’t think that’s something that has to be reserved only for downtown.”
Calcano must have been tapping into the zeitgeist, because at or around the same time that he opened Café Largo, El Alto got its very own fine-dining Italian restaurant, Aquamarina, and also Hispaniola, an Asian-influenced heavy hitter with top-level cocktails like the Rubirosa and El Generalísimo and superb contó-style box meals. And there’s 809 (named after the Dominican Republic’s main area code), opened only recently by the Moronta family (who are also the proprietors of Dyckman Express) but already popular. 809 is more relaxed than the Arka Lounge and has an inviting vibe I for one love. But the newcomer to the movement is also the one to beat: The Mamajuana Café. From its décor to its menu to its impeccable service, the Mamajuana was clearly designed to impress. On Tuesdays they offer an outstanding flamenco night; their waitstaff (as all the women around me continue to point out) includes some of the cutest Dominican boy servers ever; and they produce one of the best brunches north of 96th. The Mama-juana is named after a traditional Dominican home brew, so as you might imagine, their cocktail menu rivals the ones at both 809 and Hispaniola; and their signature Mamajuana Mojito, a Mojito first courtesy of Kathy Peña, must be sampled to be believed, and will without question soon be imitated. The manager’s recommended dish is a puerquito, but unless you’re a party of five or looking to attain yokozuna weight, I advise you to stay clear. It’s caramelized pig leg heaven, but the portion in question is roughly the size of the pig it was taken from. Turned our take-out bag into a mace, could have broken a door with it.
Now, four or five restaurants might not seem like much—especially if you live in the LES or in Silver Lake—but for those of us who’ve lived through 20, 30 years of nothing-but-mangú, it feels like the birth of a whole new era.
Of late I’ve had both the bad old days and the bright new ones on my mind. Maybe it’s because I live in Boston during the school year and in El Alto the rest of the time. Maybe it’s because I have some friends who will only eat Dominican food if it’s being served in a Café Largo or 809—too fino for anything else. And other friends who will only eat at the traditional joints, at the Caridads and the Dyckman Expresses—no newfangled fusions for them. Maybe it’s because I’m not for one campo or another. I’ve been in-country over 30 years, a decade of that time in upper Manhattan, and I’ve yet to succumb to either side of the New World–Old World debate. I guess ultimately I’m just one of those Shazam mother*******. I’m two people simultaneously, held together by the lightning that is memory. Sometimes I like to sit in Margot on Broadway and have a sancocho with a side of concon. Sometimes I like to drop in on a Hispaniola or a Mamajuana and have the pasta or the butterfish or even, yes, the puerquito. Sometimes I want mangú and sometimes I want steak and eggs and sometimes I want them both. I guess it’s the fate of immigrants como yo: to live in multiple worlds simultaneously. Can be a real pain in the ass though. In a world that privileges singular identities, we multiples are often ill-served. So imagine how thrilling it is, how nourishing, to have a neighborhood, a community, that is starting to catch up to you, catching up to how you like to eat. No wonder I call it home.
Address book
Café Largo 3387 Broadway (212-234-1811). Caridad Restaurant 3533 Broadway (212-862-4053). La Casa del Mofongo 1447 St. Nicholas Ave. (212-740-1200). 809 Restaurant Bar & Grill 112 Dyckman St. (212-304-3800). Hispaniola Restaurante 839 W. 181st St. (212-740-5222). El Malecon 4141 Broadway (212-927-3812). Mamajuana Café 247 Dyckman St. (212-304-0140). Margot Restaurant 3822 Broadway (212-781-8494). Restaurante Rancho Jubilee 1 Nagle Ave. (212-304-0100). Vinegar Hill 3385 Broadway (212-281-2083).
A Dominican Glossary
alcapurria: a deep-fried pocket made from yuca, yautía, or plantain dough, stuffed with chicken, beef, crab, shrimp, or fish
batatas: sweet potatoes, often boiled and cut into chunks
concon: the crust of rice that forms at the bottom of the pan
friquitaqui: a sandwich of ground beef or salami, carrot, tomato, mayonnaise, and hot sauce, served on a white roll
fritura: fried finger foods containing meat
gandules: pigeon peas, often served with rice
habichuelas con dulce: a dessert of red beans and coconut milk
kipe: the Dominican version of kibbeh; deep-fried pockets of bulgur dough, often stuffed with beef and raisins
mabí: a cooling fermented nonalcoholic drink made from ginger, sugar, and the bark of the mabí (smooth snakebark) tree
majarete: a sweet pudding made from corn and coconut
mangú: boiled and mashed plantain, often served with queso frito (fried cheese) or fried eggs
parcha: passion-fruit juice
pastelito de pollo: deep-fried dough stuffed with chicken
pollo guisado: stewed chicken, often prepared with peppers, tomatoes, onions, and lemon
yaniqueque: a “johnnycake” made from deep-fried dough