Puerto Rico - Overbuilt, Overhyped, Overpriced
Start with your home town. Then remove all restaurants that don’t have drive-through windows. Multiply the ones that do so that you can find about a half-dozen Burger Kings in as many miles. Remove all fresh fruit and vegetables from every plate, except for the occasional scrap of tired lettuce. Then add 50 years to all your buildings, and put bars on EVERY window in every building and home in town.
Double the traffic, triple the length of all the stop lights, then raise the prices to about double what you’d pay in most parts of the US, surround the whole thing with an ocean, and you have Puerto Rico!
A bit too unkind? Perhaps. But it’s a not-unrealistic view of the Puerto Rico I’ve seen so far. To be fair, there are occasionally local restaurants – although you must venture quite a ways off the beaten path (and I do mean QUITE a ways) to eschew the ubiquitous US burger chains – but these local restaurants seem to have an incredibly narrow list of menu options – as bad, if not worse, than Ecuador (see “Arroz By Any Other Name”). And almost everything is cooked in lard.
As far as I can tell, the only indigenous cuisine consists of either roast pig or something called mofongo. Mofongo is a mashed plantain banana dish, with the starchy plantain stuffed with chicken, conch, lobster, octopus, etc. Like all meals here, it comes with no side dishes and starts at about 10$, with some of the pricier variations costing as much as 20$ a plate.
This is not in a 5-star (or even 2-star) restaurant mind you, this is in a roadside shack. And while I tend to be fond of roadside-shack-restaurants, 20$ a plate (which is not even a slight exaggeration) seems more than a tad excessive. That said, mofongo can be fairly tasty which is thus far the only positive thing I can say about the cuisine. I hear in San Juan they have some haute cuisine, which is even more ridiculously overpriced, but I doubt I’ll be sampling that.
I have yet to see anyone here eating a vegetable or fruit of any kind. Everything is either fast food, or pure meat. I don’t even see any significant starch (rice, tortillas, etc). I was on the island for 2 days before I found a banana to buy! Every town of even moderate size has a Wal-Mart and a Sam’s Club, with all prices being at least 30% higher than in the states.
But enough about griping about the prices. For now, anyway. I should note that Puerto Ricans speak a different version of Spanish than anyone else in the world. They sort of ignore the last syllable of every word and run it into the next one. I speak moderately good Spanish, good enough to get by in Ecuador and Mexico without too many problems and communicate fairly well. But in Puerto Rico, they might as well be speaking Arabic. They can’t understand me much, and I can’t understand them hardly at all.
The upside to all this? Well, it has a beach. Some are nicer than others. I’ve not been on the best beachy sides of the island, so it’s not fair to judge them all yet. But thus far they are its only redeeming feature… we’ll see if there is anything else as we go along…
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Posted on October 12th, 2008 by Natnee and filed under Puerto Rico |
January 19th, 2012 at 4:17 am
Every single thing that you have stated about Puerto Rico is TRUE. My husband is Puerto Rican and we have vacationed, or should I say visited family in a town called Aguas Buenas, a few times. This past September we decided to go to PR and discover the island. It was awful every other traffic light has a Walgreens and burger king. We spent 90% of our time driving or should I say stuck in traffic. We stayed in a condo in Fajardo and payed more money for one week of food at the grocery store then we do in two weeks of groceries in the US. The only nice, exquisite and beautiful thing about PR that I seen and it’s not even on the main island…..is CULEBRA. The only place I will go if I ever go back is CULEBRA. Although I was paying $7.00 for a Mojito….one Mojito,crazy…right?