The story below is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
At Delicias Boricuas, Karyna Nevarez centers authenticity at the heart of her Puerto Rican menu.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Karyna & Carlos Nevarez opened Delicias Boricuas inside Crafteria in August 2022.
It’s mid-morning when I step into Crafteria and approach Delicias Boricuas and I’m greeted by the aroma of roasted pork and sizzling spices wafting from the kitchen. I shrug off my wool coat and gratefully accept the Styrofoam cup of coffee that owner Karyna Nevarez presses into my hands. I take one sip of the strong, smooth brew and guess that it must be specially sourced.
“It is coffee that’s grown in Puerto Rico, they just don’t sell it here. And it’s just too expensive to import it,” Nevarez says. “So, we drive about seven hours to pick it up. We do that trip probably every other month, because together with the coffee, there’s many of our items that, to keep everything authentic, we do have to travel long ways.”
1 of 3
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Carlos hard at work at the grill.
2 of 3
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Warm hospitality contributes to an authentic diner experience.
3 of 3
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Chefs can be notoriously fanatical about ingredient sourcing, but Nevarez’s dedication emanates from a deeply rooted sense of pride. And it shows in every empanada, bowl of rice and beans and dish of mofongo she serves at Delicias Boricuas, the Puerto Rican restaurant she opened with her husband, Carlos Nevarez, in downtown Roanoke in 2022.
Authentic can be a charged word, especially when it’s used to describe food. What makes a dish or cuisine ‘authentic’? Is it the provenance of ingredients, a commitment to technique or flavor, an adherence to tradition? For Karyna, it’s all of the above, plus a heady dose of nostalgia and cultural pride. It’s evident in the way that she embraces regulars, playfully shoos her husband back to the grill or guides a first-timer through the menu. And it’s reflected in the name: Delicias refers to delicious things, and Boricuas is used to describe a person who was born or raised in Puerto Rico, derived from Borinquen, the island’s indigenous name.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Tostones, a daily special, and a Puerto Rican staple sandwich, the Tripleta.
“I want to stay true to what the Puerto Ricans who left 10, 15 years ago remember it is to have a home cooked meal in Puerto Rico,” Karyna says.
Karyna was born and raised by a single mother in Bayamón, a suburb of San Juan in Puerto Rico’s northern coastal valley. “She was a registered nurse so the time she had at home to cook was limited. The same time when she was cooking was time to chat about what happened during the day,” Karyna says. “The kitchen was a talking place for both of us.”
Each summer, Nevarez spent several weeks with her paternal grandparents at their finca in Toa Altas. Days at their farmhouse alternated between trailing her grandfather to collect coffee, root vegetables, grapefruits and oranges, and to milk the cows, and watching her grandma cook.
“The whole place looked like out of a fairytale whenever I remember it, because my grandmother was very, very short and my grandfather built a kitchen for her downstairs because she couldn’t reach any of the cabinets,” Nevarez says. “This kitchen, downstairs, al fresco, was where everybody would come and have the great food that she would cook.”
When Nevarez moved to Florida as an adult, she worked with her sister making pasteles, a labor-intensive dish similar to Mexican tamales, in which a ground root vegetable dough is stuffed with meat, wrapped in banana leaves and wax paper, tied with twine and boiled till tender.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
These formative experiences fostered Karyna’s interest in cooking and cemented her reverence for scratch-made Puerto Rican food and traditional ingredients. The Nevarezs have called Roanoke home for about 14 years, and in 2016, they launched a frozen foods business selling pasteles; alcapurrias, stuffed fritters; coquito, a creamy, coconut-based rum drink typically enjoyed during the Christmas season; and sofrito, for which they sourced ají dulce, tiny, sweet, not spicy peppers, and culantro, a more pungent version of cilantro, that, along with onions, peppers and garlic form a paste that’s a cornerstone of Puerto Rican cuisine. Their business evolved to include catering, which earned them a loyal following among the Puerto Rican community for dishes such as arroz con gandules, a rice dish with pigeon peas, and pernil, slow-roasted pork.
When Tacorittos left Crafteria, the Nevarezs seized the opportunity to take over the modest space, consisting of a row of four tables opposite a walk up window and small kitchen. To Karyna, it called to mind cinchorros, or snack shacks. “It is nothing more than a small storefront by the side of road—basically four sticks with a ceiling and a wood-burning stove,” she says. “You go to beach and find all these cinchorros lining the side of the road and you can grab a quick snack from any one of them.”
At Delicias Boricuas, the line-up includes traditional snacks such as alcapurrias, made here with a dough of green bananas, plantains and yuca, stuffed with picadillo (seasoned ground beef) and deep-fried; rellenos de papa, deep-fried mashed potato balls stuffed with picadillo; empanadas, savory fried turnovers stuffed with beef or chicken; and pinchos, grilled chicken or pork skewers slathered with a homemade sweet-leaning barbecue sauce. Any of them pair well with a specialty soda, such as Cola Champagne.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Slow-roasted pork is a signature dish and Carlos’ pride.
There are different daily specials such as mofongo, a Saturday-only dish of green plantains that are smashed in a pilón with oil, garlic and pork rinds and double-fried. But the rice and beans are a satisfying staple all their own. The deceptively simple dish features medium grain rice, which absorbs more water and salt than long grain rice, making it so tender and flavorful you could eat it plain, and dried beans first softened by a slow simmer, then cooked with sofrito, adobo, spices, potatoes, pumpkin and other vegetables, depending on availability.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
Karyna knows that her attention to ingredients and dedication to traditional dishes is critical to her ethos, but the proof is in the feedback. “We’ve had people that have said ‘I can smell the beach right now with this alcapurria. It’s like I’m right there.’ Or ‘I can’t believe you’re using this type of rice,’ or ‘I can’t believe that I can find culantro in my soup,’ or ‘This sofrito is absolutely off the chain because it makes my whole kitchen smell when I’m cooking.’” One meal even brought a diner to tears. “I actually ran from behind the counter, because this lady was eating by herself, and she started bawling,” Karyna says. “And she said, ‘This reminded me of the mountains of Yauco and my grandmother cooking and my mother cooking. The last time I was in Yauco they were cooking together and that was last time I saw them both.’ That’s what I’m looking for in this experience. I’m looking to connect with people.”
While early word spread among the Puerto Rican community, it wasn’t long before Roanokers of all backgrounds started lining up for menu staples such as Bori Bowls, featuring rice, pinto beans and grilled chopped chicken in homemade salsa verde, and the Tripleta, a hearty sandwich piled with chicken, steak and pork. Pork is Carlos’ pride, which is amply seasoned (per Karyna’s strict instructions) and slow-roasted for up to nine hours.
Layla Khoury-Hanold
“It’s extremely tender and juicy,” Karyna says. “You’ll always get a sample even if you don’t order it and you say that you haven’t tried Puerto Rican food.”
Word and demand have traveled beyond Roanoke, too. Nevarez estimates that 20 to 25 percent of diners are out-of-state travelers, either families travelling from places such as Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Pennsylvania for appointments at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, or the burgeoning community of truck drivers who stop off I-81, park at the Berglund Center, place their order and either have it delivered to the parking lot or walk to the restaurant to pick it up.
For the uninitiated, Nevarez wants people to understand that Puerto Rican food is not spicy, unlike other Hispanic cuisines. “There are no hot peppers raised in Puerto Rico,” Nevarez says. “We cook with a lot of spices, so the food is extremely flavorful, but it has no heat.”
Her one concession to deviating from authenticity is offering a variety of hot sauces, developed by one of her cooks, Daniel Stallings. The sauces have become so popular that they are sold by the bottle, too.
“We always encourage people to try food without it first,” Nevarez says, “just so they can get a taste of the actual flavor.”
The story above is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!