Discovering the New San Juan

A food truck on Avenida Ponce de Leon. (Photo: Randy Harris)

By Randy Harris, Conde Nast Traveler

I had been in San Juan for only a few hours when I found myself on a deserted street in the sprawling industrial neighborhood of Santurce. Having already ducked under a highway overpass and skirted a venue called D’Girls—a sushi bar that morphs, according to the faded lettering of the sign out front, into an after-hours strip club—I was clearly no longer within the city’s traditional tourist-approved boundaries. No crystalline beaches here, no cobblestoned streets of Spanish colonial antiquity. Just this potholed little road lined with crumbling apartment buildings and lit by streetlights so dim they seemed designed to enhance the darkness. But then it came: the buoyant sounds of music and laughter, transforming what had seemed like a foreboding backstreet I’d mistakenly entered into a place of mystery and possibility, of a good time about to be had.

The source of this was a restaurant at the end of the block called Jose Enrique, which despite the lack of a sign was impossible to miss. Clusters of people were waiting for tables out front, drinks in hand, tattoos snaking up their arms. Inside, the spirit was equally casual and festive, though as I settled in for a meal at the bar’s lone empty stool, it quickly became apparent that this was something more than a charming island dive; it was one of the many places that have opened in recent years to challenge San Juan’s reputation as a city where you put up with mediocre food and ignore the local culture in exchange for a lounge chair facing the ocean.

The signature cocktail, a frothy blend of rum, coconut water, and pineapple and passion fruit juice, had none of that resort-town cloying sweetness; the waiter was nonchalant in pointing out that the salad contained organic greens from a farmers’ market in Guavate; and a single bite of the whole red snapper, deboned and deep-fried and served with a tangy papaya-and-avocado salsa, was enough to understand why the chef and owner had recently been nominated for a James Beard Award. By the end of the meal, I had been roped into a group of young and stylish strangers next to me at the bar, who, with the help of too many shots of aged rum, soon felt like old friends.

Stumbling back to my room at the Olive Boutique Hotel, which opened two years ago as a counterpoint to the sprawling resorts that dominate the upscale Condado neighborhood, I suddenly realized why the experience felt so familiar. It had the unmistakable stamp of the Brooklyn neighborhoods I’ve lived in for many years, though not in the form they take today but as they were five or 10 years ago: scrappy but sophisticated, in that sweet transitional spot where it was still possible to feel in on a secret, part of something new and indisputably thrilling. Over the next few days this feeling only intensified as I wandered around San Juan, often in neighborhoods that visitors have long been advised to avoid, meandering into small-plate restaurants like Gallo Negro, in once-sleepy Miramar, or La Factoria, a craft-cocktail speakeasy in Old San Juan that has become popular among locals and visitors staying at the Dreamcatcher, a hostel in Ocean Park with vintage furnishings and yoga classes. Though there was no avoiding the shuttered businesses and talk of Puerto Rico’s economic hardship, it was clear to me that in the shadows of the megaresorts and cruise ships, the city was coming back to life.

Aside from the fact that San Juan is attracting a new, cooler breed of visitor—the sort who in the past may have opted for, say, a week in St. Barts — what makes the island compelling now is that it’s slowly begun to draw permanent residents from the mainland who are excited to discover a place that’s both of America and removed from it. On my second day in town, I stopped in Aaron Stewart Home, a high-end furniture boutique opened last fall by Aaron Stewart and Fernando Rodriguez, a couple who moved to the city from New York. Located in a former Ford factory in Puerta de Tierra, a stretch of low buildings on the outskirts of Old San Juan long known for its high crime rate, their store is one of the businesses that are turning the neighborhood into the city’s first art and design district. Nearby is Walter Otero Contemporary Art, and across the street is an outpost of the furniture emporium Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams. As a result, new spots have opened—like El Livin, a restaurant in a nearby park—and a fresh energy has taken hold in local haunts like the Mexican favorite El Charro. Above Aaron Stewart Home, local artist Carlos Mercado has set up a massive studio that he plans to turn into a gallery/salon to show his and others’ works, now that he’s finished designing a boutique hotel slated to open in a neighborhood church.

“We really like the idea of being pioneers, which is basically impossible to do in New York anymore,” said Rodriguez, a handsome, perpetually tanned 47-year-old who, having grown up in San Juan, was still adjusting to the city’s present incarnation. Along with Stewart, a 40-year-old who once worked for Martha Stewart (no relation), we were dining later that evening at Soda, a fashionably low-key restaurant not far from their apartment in Miramar, where the main thoroughfare contained a mix of patrons heading into the arthouse cinema and wizened old men playing dominoes in fluorescent-lit salsa bars. When Stewart and Rodriguez moved here, they were prepared to adjust to a scaled-down lifestyle. “That, at least, was the plan,” Stewart said with a laugh, adding that the store had created opportunities they hadn’t expected and could not have imagined back in New York. “There really wasn’t anything like it in the whole city, and as a result all these people have come out of the woodwork asking us to be interior designers.” Both noted that they owed their new clientele in large part to the passing of Act 22, a 2012 law intended to boost the island’s struggling economy by giving tax breaks to high-income individuals from elsewhere who make a home here. Puerto Rico is still losing residents hit by unemployment and austerity measures, but by many accounts there are glimmers of a growing prosperity in San Juan.

“We really thought we were just coming here to open a little shop,” Stewart continued, “but now the design business is as big as anything we were doing in New York.” Among their early commissions was a pop-up shop for the lobby of the new Ritz-Carlton Reserve in Dorado, which they hired a friend from New York to help them with. “She loved it so much that she decided to move here,” Rodriguez noted. “There’s no question that something special is happening.”

After renting a bike the following day, I spent the afternoon cruising around Tras Talleres, which roughly translates as “Behind the Warehouses” and not long ago was a place you ventured to only if you needed a muffler replaced. Today it is the street-art capital of the Caribbean, with intricate graffiti covering every other building. My destination was El Departamento de la Comida, a vegan café/organic market/craft store/unofficial boho headquarters that opened two years ago in an old garage squeezed between two auto body shops. Its owner, Tara Rodriguez, a 30-year-old native who moved to Brooklyn to study architecture at Pratt, recently gave a TED Talk about El Departamento’s mission to bring the sustainable food movement to her home city. Sitting on a well-worn mid-century sofa with a bowl of fresh gazpacho, I stared out across the street at the massive former housing projects that stood as a testament to both where the neighborhood had been and where it was going: They were in the process of being turned into condominiums for the moneyed residents who had discovered the neighborhood.

That night I got together with Juan Jose Robledo, a gregarious 36-year-old whom I’d first met at the restaurant Jose Enrique, in order to get what he referred to as a “local’s tour” of Santurce’s ever-evolving Calle Loíza. “Dude, it’s crazy what’s happened here,” Robledo told me as we drove along the street in his beat-up SUV. “I grew up around here, and back then there was nothing. Sketchy bars, a few mom-and-pop places, that’s it. But now you have things like that,” he said, pointing to what looked like a vacant lot. “See the screen in the back? They show movies out here a few times a week.”

It was a Friday night, and the bars and restaurants lining the street were teeming with people, only a minority of whom seemed to have been born before 1980. Our first stop was a “whiskey pizzeria” called Loiza 2050, open since 1986 and renovated by the owner’s daughter last year. With its salvaged wood, graffiti-covered walls, and impressive selection of small-batch whiskies, 2050 has adapted to the neighborhood in its current state. Since the Mexican place that Robledo wanted to take me to next had a wait of more than an hour, we instead made our way to Tresbé, a restaurant in a bright-yellow shipping container, where the organic beef sliders were cooked by owner Mario Ormaza, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.

The night ended when, inexplicably, I glanced down at my watch and noticed that it was nearly 6 a.m.—which can happen in San Juan if you’re not careful. Needless to say, Robledo had taken me to a number of bars and, knowing the effect that such a night can have, had promised to take me for a fortifying lunch the following day at a restaurant called La Casita Blanca. “It’s old-school, real Puerto Rico—like eating at your grandmother’s house,” he told me as the car weaved through Villa Palmeras, a neighborhood still plagued with poverty and violence. (Since no one walks the streets at night, the restaurant is only open for lunch.) But even here there are signs of change. After serving us a meal of starchy plantains, fried steak, and avocado stuffed with crabmeat, the owner, Jesus Pérez, took me to the roof to show off the organic garden he had installed over the past year. “It’s important to know where my food comes from,” he explained.

I could have been back in Brooklyn, with one notable exception: Less than a mile away I was able to find a nearly empty stretch of beach, where, in the shade of a palm tree, I happily passed out.

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