Reclaiming Puerto Rico’s Food Paradise
VIEQUES, P.R. — The sun was starting to recline on the horizon, but as the chef Jose Enrique slid a beaten-up Ford Explorer into a parking space here at an easygoing beachside hotel called El Blok , he admitted that his menu for this Saturday evening was still up in the air. What would he be cooking? “I have no clue,” he said, and laughed. “We’ll see. I kind of like it that way. I think it makes me more creative.” Mr. Enrique and Katie Savage, his chef de cuisine at the hotel, tend to wing it based on whatever baskets of fruit, bags of vegetables and buckets of seafood come their way. Dinner that night would overflow with lobster ceviche, a conch salad spooned into steaming pockets of fried bread, a dip spun from eggplants that had been smoked over the wood of wild mesquite trees, a pork chop brushed with sugar-cane juice. Toward the end would come a sweet, coral-hued sphere of guava ice. Where did the guavas come from? Mr. Enrique motioned toward the window. The fruit tree stood ri...