Writer Monti Carlo will be talking with Gab Chabrán about her new book, Spanglish, at a Cookbook Live event on May 21.
A plate of arroz con gandules, maduros, pasteles, and pernil from Señor Big Ed's in Cypress, one of the few Puerto Rican restaurants in SoCal.
This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, In L.A. , we tout ourselves as having one of the best food scenes in the world, with cuisines from nearly every corner of the globe available to sample. And yet a few still occasionally fall through the cracks.
Blame geography, or the lack of a sizable population to sustain such establishments. Either way, the gap is real. Puerto Rican food is one of those cuisines. Despite a handful of restaurants scattered throughout the Southland, cocina criolla remains largely underrepresented.
For me, it's personal. My grandfather was Puerto Rican, born on the island and eventually settling in El Paso, Texas, where he met my grandmother — who was Mexican — before shipping out to fight in the Korean War. He came back, but the family didn't hold. He and my grandmother split when my dad was young.
And yet his spirit has always loomed in the family background. If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
I'm always looking for ways to connect with that side of my heritage, which is why, when I heard chef and writer Monti Carlo was writing a cookbook calledA Compton-born coffee pop-up is thriving inside a Pasadena taco shop His Caffeinated Cart went viral on TikTok, so he quit his job and partnered with one of L.A. ’s legendary taco shops. Jessica Wang has spent over $200,000 in rent for a Chinatown space she can't operate.
Permits may take months more — or arrive tomorrow. , where she placed fifth. Since then, she's served as an advisor for the James Beard Foundation. Monti Carlo, author of "Spanglish: Recipes & Stories," will be in conversation at The Crawford in Pasadena on Thursday, May 21.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she spent much of her youth in Texas — navigating what many of us know as a hybrid identity, that particular life lived between cultures. Hence the title: Spanglish is a term used by many whose families come from Latin American countries but who grow up speaking English, often mixing both languages in the same sentence, sometimes in the same breath.
For Carlo, it's also an act of reclamation — taking back a word that's long been used to marginalize Puerto Ricans in the diaspora. When discussing the recipes in her book, Carlo keeps coming back to one dish in particular: pastelón. It's a dish that encapsulates the cuisine — sweet fried plantain slices layered with picadillo, a beef mince made with raisins and olives, bound together with egg, and blanketed in cheese. And that distinction matters.
Puerto Rican cuisine, she's quick to note, isn't built around heat the way Mexican food is. It's subtler than that, rooted in a balance of contrasts — and no ingredient embodies that better than the plantain, which Carlo describes as the most foundational ingredient in the cuisine, even though it wasn't originally native to the island, having been brought by enslaved people from Africa.
"My goodness, what a plantain can do," she said. "From being eaten green to being eaten while it's surrounded by fruit flies. " To her, that full arc — starchy and firm at one end, deeply sweet and soft at the other — is a portrait of Puerto Rican cooking itself. Carlo's version in the book is vegetarian, using mushrooms instead of ground beef, while keeping two of the cuisine's foundational bases intact: recaíto and sazón.
Recaíto is a pureed aromatic blend — green peppers, herbs, and recao — that gives dishes their distinctive green hue. Sazón is a dry seasoning made up of garlic powder, oregano, coriander, annatto, and ground turmeric. Puerto Rican food exists in SoCal — you just have to know where to look.
As someone who's always on the lookout for a plate of pasteles or a bowl of mofongo, a few spots have stood the test of time, including Señor Big Ed's in Cypress and Mofongos in North Hollywood.has been open since 1982 — though it didn't start as a Puerto Rican restaurant. It opened as a Green Burrito, a local Mexican fast food chain that was later purchased by the company that owns Carl's Jr. The name comes from an item on the original menu, and it stuck even after the previous owner, Rafael Rodriguez, originally from San Juan, added Puerto Rican food to the menu in 1990.
A spread from Mofongos in North Hollywood featuring an alcapurria, a mofongo with broth, and pique, shot on an El Gran Combo record. Yolanda Coronado has cooked at Señor Big Ed's since day one and bought the restaurant in 2003. Her daughter Veronica, who helps manage day-to-day operations, said the name still catches people off guard.
"The restaurant is named after a burrito," she laughed. But the food is unambiguously boricua — and Coronado makes sure of it, offering free pastelillos to anyone who walks in looking for a taco.
"As soon as I see someone trying to order a taco or a burrito, I'm like, hey, have you tried the Puerto Rican food? " For the Puerto Ricans who find them, the reaction is often immediate. "They get emotional when they see the flags," she said. "They start smelling the sofrito and the garlic.
It reminds them of grandma's cooking.
", has been making the same case since November 2009. "When I started the business, there weren't any Puerto Rican restaurants in Los Angeles County," he said. Nearly 17 years later, he's built a following that includes Jimmy Smits, Luis Guzmán, and Cardi B — though Coën is quick to note the restaurant is as much for an electrician as an actor. Awareness, he says, is growing slowly, with some help.
"The popularity of people like Bad Bunny has made people curious about things that are Puerto Rican — that really helps out," he said. A tray of empanadas from Olga's Empanadas, a Puerto Rican cottage kitchen operation run by Olga Gonzalez out of her home in Perris. And the search extends further than you might expect. Out in Perris — some 70 miles from downtown L.A.
— Olga Gonzalez runs a cottage kitchen out of her home, selling homemade Puerto Rican empanadas fried or frozen for pickup. Olga Gonzalez inherited the business,, from her late mother Ana, who started it in the San Gabriel Valley. While also working the graveyard shift at a warehouse, Gonzalez has grown the menu to 16 flavors, drawing customers from Beaumont, Temecula, and Hemet — and as far as Watts and Compton, making the reverse trek.
"I have so many customers just saying like, we don't have any of this out here," Gonzalez said. "That's why I'm cooking. "at 6 p.m., and she's not coming empty-handed. She'll be cooking — a passion fruit hand cake, to be exact — and if you're wondering what that means for me, she's already warned me that it's arms day .
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