PARKER, Colo. — In the small town of Parker, south of Denver, an old home converted into a restaurant invites guests to experience the Caribbean through food, music and colorful decor.
Chef Jose Rivera and his wife Karen Reyes opened Isla Verde to share the flavors they grew up with on the island of Puerto Rico.
“It was a new experience for us, a new challenge, because Parker is not recognized for having a lot of Latino community," said Rivera. Only about 12% of the town’s population comes from Latin America, and across Colorado, less than 3% of the state's population originally comes from Puerto Rico.
“It was our opportunity to bring our colors, flavors, music, atmosphere, to a place that it hasn't been before,” he said.
Rivera and Reyes run the restaurant with the help of their children, son-in-law and employees they say have become family too.
The chefs grew up around cooking and fell in love over their shared goal to share those recipes with others.
“My father used to have a restaurant back home in Ponce, Puerto Rico,” Rivera said. It was there he met Reyes. They got married and went to culinary school together.
"That's when the love for the Caribbean cuisine started between the two of us," Rivera said. “She was more on the sweet side, and I was more on the savory, salty, fried stuff,” he said.
It was a natural disaster in 1998 that brought them to Colorado.
“Hurricane Georges pretty much destroyed my dad's restaurant, and it was really hard to get back up on our feet," Rivera said.
Their family moved to the Front Range and cooked everywhere from hotels to schools and hospitals. Then they found community with immigrants from other Caribbean islands.
For nearly a decade, they worked at the Cuba Bakery and Havana Bakery owned by Orlando Colombe.
“Cuban and Puerto Rican food is very similar," Rivera said. “We use the same ingredients. We do a lot of rice, we do a lot of beans, then we eat a lot of pork.”
But Rivera said he and his wife were “very hungry” to share the dishes they grew up with.
That's why they bought the Havana Bakery and converted it into Isla Verde about a year and a half ago.
Now, their pastry case is filled with Puerto Rican quesillos and alcapurrias – pastries filled with cream cheese and fried plantains stuffed with meat – alongside Cuban pastelitos and empanadas.
Atop the case sits a pilón: a mortar and pestle key to Puerto Rican cooking. This one is more than 70 years old and belonged to Rivera’s grandmother. It’s a symbol of where his family comes from – and a tool he uses every day in the kitchen.
The pilón is how Rivera makes his signature dish mofongo: fried plantains mashed with garlic and filled with meat.
While their menu includes dishes from across the Caribbean, Reyes said it makes her happy to offer Puerto Rican classics customers can’t find elsewhere. At Christmastime she serves pasteles, a labor of love that encases pork in a mixture of mashed plantains and wraps it all in a banana leaf. Reyes said customers love the nostalgic dish so much they’ve asked her to make it year-round. Now, she takes custom orders with a two-week lead time.
Reyes also serves up desserts like flan and banana bread with ice cream.
"I bring my own recipe,” she said. “So, people love it.”
So far, the chefs said they’ve had customers looking for nostalgic flavors of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic – along with people trying the cuisine for the first time.
"There's an option for everybody, for everybody, no matter where they come from,” Rivera said. “The most beautiful thing is that they are accepting us.”