More Puerto Rico: tasty food and GU hoops

I know people, some of them intimately, who have a love affair with food. Like an old high school buddy of mine who could never imagine life without a beer in his hand, rest his soul, some people prefer to eat at actual restaurants.

You know, the kinds with tablecloths and stuff.

To be fair, on the recent trip that my wife Mary Pat and I took to Puerto Rico we ate at a few restaurants like that. More often, though, we opted to stop at outdoor or street-side cafes. Such a place is Rincón Boricua.

To get there, we left the main highway (Highway 2) that circles the island and braved the narrow back roads. And though it took less time than I expected to get there, the driving was – and this is what I wrote in my journal – “hectic, reminiscent at times of driving in Sicily.”

The difference is, of course, that I got into an accident in Sicily while trying to navigate my way around the city of Catania. Let’s just say that driving in Puerto Rico was, overall, a far easier task.

Anyway, we found Rincón Boricua fairly easily. It’s a modest spot, an open-air café that boasts a menu full of Puerto Rican dishes – we opted for the classic small sampler, 24 pieces of the following: Sorullitos, carne frita, chicharrones de pollo, Bolitas queso y Croquetas de jamón.

So many fried foodstuffs, so little time to consume them all. Then off to our next destination: the city of Ponce.

Once back on Highway 2, we made a slight detour to see Mayaguez, a sea-side city the guidebooks say has a number of attractions – more statues of Columbus, a cathedral, beaches, etc. But the town looked run down, uninviting and we were in a hurry. So we motored on.

Which brings up a point: Despite stories about the power outages that have affected the entire island over the past few months, we didn’t see any real obvious signs of poverty throughout Puerto Rico. Sure, many of the buildings looked weathered. But we saw nothing that is as bad as parts of Mexico City, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the slums of Cali, Colombia, or the shanty towns outside of Cape Town, South Africa.

(Side note: It feels strange to write about poverty when we were headed toward a place called the Hilton Ponce Golf & Casino Resort. I don’t think I’ll ever reconcile the fact that I’ve been fortunate in my life when so many others have not.)

Yes, the place where we booked a room just outside of Ponce itself now carries the grand name of Hilton Ponce Golf & Casino Resort. Once called simply the Caribe Hilton Hotel, the complex has a history dating back to 1946 (though it didn’t open until just before Christmas three years later).

Owned by the Hilton chain, it boasts of having hosted such luminaries as the actress Gloria Swanson, the former Word War I ace (and Eastern Airlines President) Eddie Rickenbacker and long-distance swimmer Gertrude Ederle (Olympic champion and first woman to swim the English channel).

It’s also the place that claims to have invented the Piña Colada. (Though maybe we should ask Rupert Holmes about that.)

Our first room had a view of the Caribbean Sea, but it was on the ground floor and fronted a pedestrian walkway. So we asked to be moved, which is how we ended up on the fourth floor of a different building – though again with a sea view.

The complex overall showed no effects that I could see of the 2017 Hurricane Maria that is said to have devastated the whole island. (Apparently, though, the place had been damaged enough so that it was closed until 2019 while undergoing a $100 million renovation.)

We spent the afternoon relaxing. We even managed to watch the Gonzaga men’s basketball team beat Georgia, 89-68, in their opening game of the NCAA tournament. Go Zags!

That evening we braved the drive into Ponce itself. Our destination was the restaurant El Rastro, which we found on the corner of an otherwise unassuming urban neighborhood street. The GPS on Mary Pat’s iPhone made the trip a whole lot easier as the parts of Ponce I was driving in consist of narrow, mostly unmarked streets with few stop signs. So I had to be continually vigilant to avoid the cross traffic.

Eating at El Rastro was well worth the effort. Our server was nice, she spoke perfect English, the well-lit and artistically adorned place was nearly empty, and our food was particularly tasty: risotto with “setas” (Spanish for mushrooms) for me, mahi mahi for Mary Pat.

We spent the next day at the hotel doing little more than watching the NCAAs (which gave us get a bad feeling about the upcoming GU-Houston game), lounging by the hotel pool, and then playing nine holes of golf that afternoon on the surprisingly scruffy course (which, naturally enough, matched our mutual abilities). That evening we shared a plate of panko-crusted friend shrimp at the hotel’s outdoor patio restaurant while watching even more hoops on a giant-screen TV.

You might ask, why didn’t we go into Ponce and experience more of what the city proper has to offer? It’s a fair question and one that I addressed in an earlier blog post: Puerto Rican drivers. I have only so much driving karma left, and I still had hundreds of miles to go before we could return our rental car to the San Juan airport.

So just taking it easy seemed like the best option. Because I suspected that one of our future destinations, El Yunque National Forest, just might put my driving skills to the biggest test yet.

Next up: El Conquistador: a resort in the true sense of the word.