1720 North California Avenue (map)
(773) 227-6038
www.borinquenjibaro.com
$

Simplicity is often the hallmark of great regional or ethnic cooking. Yet simple ingredients can result in a complexity of flavors that defines a culture’s cooking.

Such is the case at Chicago’s Borinquen Restaurant. The Humboldt Park eatery is a simple building, simply decorated, with an added cinder- block dining room behind its cafeteria-like front room.

The food at Borinquen is the soul food of working-class Puerto Rico. It heavily emphasizes the foods that are available to those who live in less wealthy communities outside of the cosmopolitan city of San Juan.

At Borinquen one will find tasty, fatty, slow-roasted pork redolent of garlic and sazon, a prepackaged seasoning mix of coriander and annatto. Other Puerto Rican specialties on the menu include mofongo, a deep-fried ball of green plantain surrounding a hidden treat of pork or chicken in the middle, and pastele, a luscious steamed dumpling of mashed plantain. One will also find excellent seasoned greens and pigeon peas lovingly and slowly simmered with morcilla, a spicy blood sausage.

However, the star of Borinquen’s menu is an untraditional Puerto Rican dish, the jibarito (literally translated, “little hillbilly”) sandwich. The jibarito consists of two flattened, deep-fried plantains filled with a choice of roast beef, roast pork, chicken, or ham along with garlicky mayonnaise, tomatoes, and cheese.
The beauty of the jibarito lies in the complexity and contrasts among otherwise simple ingredients: crispy and moist, savory and sweet, cold and hot. The jibarito has become the food symbol of working-class Puerto Ricans in Chicago, just as the rest of Borinquen’s menu represents the comfort food of the working class on the island of Puerto Rico.