Puerto Rico III (last non-Boston post, I swear...)

Okay, so this is my last post about Puerto Rico, but I thought the non-Puerto Rican food we had warranted a separate post-- It wasn’t all fried mashed potatoes and rice and beans!

We had some incredible dining experiences.

Our first night we ate at Pamela’s, an oceanfront

restaurant where the tables are literally on the beach. Having your toes in sand while you sip on champagne, the warm ocean breeze wrapped around you and the sound of rustling palm trees—it’s cliché, but its quite the out of body, enlightening experience. The service was exquisite, and the tempura bananas with cinnamon and ice cream was quickly devoured:

On night two we headed to the Water Club, a boutique hotel a few minutes from our hotel. We dined on their roof deck lounge, which was very South Beach in ambiance, with white beds and cool blue lighting. We ordered sushi and after striking up a conversation with the sushi chef discovered that he had lived in the South End for years and worked at Jae’s! Small world… While the views were outstanding and the mango mojitos sweet and refreshing, the tiny pieces of uninteresting sushi left quite a bit to be desired. And that's how we ended up at Wendy's in Puerto Rico at 11:30 pm. . .

Our favorite dinner though was our night in Old San Juan. We started at The Parrot Club for drinks, a hip and funky restaurant with fun drinks, like my “mojitini” (a mojito martini!). Then we wandered across the street to Dragonfly, which Zain (our guide book author) described as “see and be seen dining.” Zain was certainly right; the inside was much more New York City than Caribbean. Red lighting, men and women dressed to the nines, large crowds huddled around the bar sipping martinis, a group of young businessmen getting bottle service—this scene looked very familiar, which was almost a disappointment. Why travel to see what you could see any Saturday night?

But the menu’s curious offerings and bold flavor combinations (the cuisine is described as Spanish/Asian fusion) piqued our interest enough to make us stay, and even wait quite a while for a table. Thank God we did, though! We started with calamari, cooked in a really spicy cilantro sauce (sorry, no menu available online so I’m trying to remember food from weeks ago…) with a chili dipping sauce. Mmmmm! Then we had a spicy tuna roll with jalapenos. Needless to say, after those two dishes my mouth was on fire! Luckily, our awesome waiter Brenda made sure our water glasses were always filled.

But my absolute favorite dish was (drum roll, please) the Peking duck nachos with wasabi sour cream. Yeah. You read that right. If I were wealthy, this is a dish that I would fly to Puerto Rico for. Because you can’t recreate the light and crunchy chips, the tender shredded duck, the spicy and silky wasabi sour cream, or the tangy, crunchy slaw.

And so folks, this concludes my posts about Puerto Rico. I'll end with a photo: