Juliana Gonzalez
“This is my first time cooking Puerto Rican food in a restaurant,” Juliana Gonzalez confides. “It’s a whole new challenge to combine the food of my childhood with the techniques that I know today.”
Though Gonzalez, who hails from the southwestern beach town of Cabo Rojo, first discovered her passion for food through
“REALLY, WHAT PUERTO RICAN DOESN’T DREAM OF GOING BACK?”
the dishes her mother and grandmother made, her tastes during adulthood pivoted often as she embraced one international cuisine after another, from French (which she learned at David Bouley’s Evolution) to Japanese (at Nobu and SushiSamba) to Spanish (which she serves at her critically hailed Miami tapas restaurant Barceloneta).
The desire to cook her native cuisine on her native soil, however, always remained a hopeful
ambition. “I always said that I wanted to go back to the island,” she says. “Because, really, what
Puerto Rican doesn’t dream of going back?”
That dream materialized sooner than expected when the El San Juan Hotel approached Gonzalez last year to conceive a contemporary Puerto Rican restaurant from scratch. For the chef, the opportunity to lend her wide-ranging experience to the cuisine that first sparked her desire to cook was a no-brainer. She set to work, mining long-beloved family recipes—as well as her own memories—to revisit the flavors of her past. “I wanted to create a very Puerto Rican menu but with something different that the island hadn’t quite seen before,” she says.
Thus, Caña was born. Named for the sugarcane that has sustained much of Puerto Rico’s agricultural history, the colorful restaurant will open next month with an eclectic look that blends traditional handmade tiles, old family photos, and modern furnishings. Fusion will carry the menu, as well, with dishes like crudo served with fresh coconut, strawberries, and other fruits of the island; arroz con gandules prepared with a flair of Catalan flavor; and churrasco steak with Asian-inspired sides like bok choy and pickled onions.
For Gonzalez, a return to Puerto Rico also meant a chance to support her island at a crucial time of recovery. “I wanted to focus on the farmers first,” she says. “The farm-to-table movement is finally happening on the island, and we’re now able to get things fresh that we never could before,” she says, noting that everything from the flowers on the tables to the suckling pigs and guinea fowl come from local producers. “It’s so important right now to support the local markets and the local people and, most of all, to help my fellow Puerto Ricans.”