Jean-Luc gets me fed in San Juan

Posted by parker 7 months ago

I often mention time abroad as something which pushed me into a more adventuresome approach to food, but there was one trip when food pushed me into an adventure of sorts.

I was 20 and on a spring break training trip in Puerto Rico with my college track team. We'd been running triple workouts at a back-country training site for three or four days, and this day we rested (some), running only in the morning and taking a bus in to San Juan for the rest of the day.

I had been walking around Old Town with one of the senior captains, a sprinter and jumper named Jean-Luc who hailed from Haiti via the American South. We didn't have the cash to eat fancy, but we wanted to avoid fast food or tourist joints as well.

We were headed down a back street, looking in some of the huge street windows the houses have in the old town, when we went by one where the open windows showed three or four big tables, a tile floor, a stove in the back, and a menu painted on the wall. The men at the tables were spattered with paint or grease; it looked like the sort of crowd you'd see at a truck stop.

"Looks like a local haunt," I said, preparing to move on, but Jean-Luc stopped me and pulled us in.

Within seconds he and the cook were deep in conversation in Haitian creole. Meanwhile, I was experiencing (probably for the first time in my life, but ultimately not the last) the uncomfortable feeling of being the only white person in the room, standing there in my shorts and t-shirt amid a group of men who had plainly worked hard for their dinners.

Jean-Luc, the cook's new favorite, and I were seated in the front corner and Jean-Luc explained that dinner was on its way. The cook, he said, thought we were crew from a visiting cruise ship, and Jean-Luc was high on his list as one of his countrymen.

Dinner was most of a roasted chicken, sticky rice and vegetables. The chicken tasted good, but greasy; the rice was heavy. I remember being barely halfway through the meal and feeling full, wondering if I would offend Jean-Luc's new friend if I didn't clean my plate.

But since then I've remembered Jean-Luc and Old San Juan every time I find myself in a strange place with little clue about feeding myself. I push on in, follow the locals' lead for manners, and hope to be more unobtrusive than I was then. Sometimes, it even works.