Frommer's Review
Set beside a (usually quiet) stretch of cobble-covered street in the uppermost altitudes of the Old City, this is a well-recommended and defiantly proud restaurant that's not in the least ashamed to proudly advertise its sense of Puerto Rican nationalism. It's the only restaurant in the Old Town with a famous work of art painted directly onto its concrete facade. It depicts the Puerto Rican separatist Don Pedro Albizu Campos, a Harvard-educated intellectual who was jailed as a revolutionary in the 1950s and who died in the 1960s. In the original, widely disseminated portrait, painted by the well-known local artist, Dennis Mario Rivera, he's pierced, in a style befitting San Sebastian himself, with arrows. In a restaurant this aggressively politicized, you'd naturally expect, and you'd get, a tremendous emphasis on Puerto Rican cuisine. We usually pass through the long and narrow dining room, then order a drink in the open-air courtyard bar in back before lunch or dinner at this place. Menu items are creative but deeply entrenched in Puerto Rican (criolla) traditions. Examples include pork ribs in guava-flavored barbecue sauce; filets of salmon in tamarind and caper sauce; mofongos stuffed with either chicken, shrimp, or shredded crab; pork sandwiches with sweet-potato fries; octopus salads; fish turnovers; ceviche made from mahimahi and salmon; and Puerto Rican-style blood and chicken sausage. Other choices include eggplant lasagna with shrimp; shrimp in a piña colada sauce; and filet mignon with mushroom-flavored brandy sauce. There's live music presented here every Thursday (jazz) and Saturday ("romantic bohemian") from around 8pm till closing.
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