JIBARITOS Y MAS SERIES

“It’s made to be eaten by hand,” said Arrieta.

On the side – arroz con gandules, or rice with pigeon peas, and perhaps a few extra napkins. That tiny spoonful of garlic is a game-changer, adding a burst of flavor, and mimicking a traditional tostone. “So you start adding mayo, lettuce, tomato, cheese you choose the protein of your preference – the most popular ones are steak, chicken, pork cut it right in the middle, add a little garlic on the top and you serve it,” he said. Pork, or lechon, is outstanding, but so is traditional sliced beef, smothered with cooked onions.Įvery jibarito begins with the bottom plantain getting a shmear of creamy mayo.

Other, nonfried dishes made-to-order, such as the annatto-tinged chicken soup bobbing with silky pieces of leg and thigh, are also at odds with a takeout model.The Food Guy: Restaurants for a Special Occasion Often overlooked dishes like the pollo frito, an unbattered, shatteringly crispy leg-thigh combo, or the mofongo, dense orbs of garlicky chicharrón-larded mashed plantain, reveal their true textural dimensions when eaten on the spot. The cuchifrito game in general at both locations is extraordinary. There’s no longer a legitimate reason to snuff out a perfectly executed jibarito in a Styrofoam coffin. Not just jibaritos, but all of the classic Puerto Rican comida criolla funded a third expansion in January when they opened a dining room next door to HQ. Jibaritos y Mas Credit: JEFF MARINI FOR CHICAGO READER Don’t bother trying to phone in an order at noon. Nevertheless, there aren’t too many tables at the original location, and the frenetic takeout business they do there abides. It nearly doesn’t matter what you choose to fill it with-roast pork, chicken, ham and cheese, octopus, blood sausage a plate, with a side of arroz con gandules, and a half-inch stack of paper napkins is the only civilized delivery system for the jibarito. Like the mothership, the place does a thrumming takeout business, but “the real experience is when you eat it at the moment,” he says, just after the plantain has been bisected to order, deep fried, smashed flat, and fried again. You have to attack it.”įrom left: Arroz con gandules, pollo frito, lechon con arroz blanco Credit: JEFF MARINI FOR CHICAGO READERĪrrieta, who runs the family’s second spot, Jibaritos on Harlem in Dunning on the very western edge of the city, says a lot of people don’t get this-or don’t care. “You gotta hold it with your two hands and don’t be scared of it. “You have to get dirty,” says Jesus Arrieta, Rivera’s son, who enlisted with his mother four years ago when she opened Jibaritos y Mas at the corner of Fullerton and Kimball, the footprint of a nascent jibarito empire. Like all the other native-born icons in Chicago’s sandwich canon-the Italian beef, the pork chop sandwich, the gym shoe-the jibarito or “little hillbilly,” is an ungainly mess, and there’s only one way to eat it to fully appreciate its potential. The fillings were foreign: shaved bistec, shredded iceberg, tomato, mayo, and American cheese. Order food online at Jibaritos Y Mas, Chicago with Tripadvisor: See 10 unbiased reviews of Jibaritos Y Mas, ranked 1,764 on Tripadvisor among 9,950 restaurants in Chicago. When she found work at a food stall in the now-erased Mega Mall in Logan Square, jibaritos were on the menu, as they were in nearly every Puerto Rican restaurant in town by that time (though they hadn’t proliferated anywhere else-not even on the island).

See, her hometown in northwest Venezuela is the birthplace of the patacón Maracucho, a sandwich of strikingly similar construction, best eaten when the starchy green bananas are still hot and crispy from the fryer, and you’re in the right frame of mind and physical circumstances to negotiate the unstable strata within. Figueroa at the late great Borinquen Restaurant. It was the jibarito, the mojo-slicked pressed plantain sandwich invented in Humboldt Park by Juan C. Yelitza Rivera made at least one easy adjustment after she left Maracaibo, Venezuela, almost 20 years ago.

JIBARITOS Y MAS SERIES

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Jibaritos y mas