No matter how creative cooks get with mofongo — and by the look of things, the Puerto Rican staple can get downright architectural — the heart of the dish still lies with a native plant, the green plantain, which is fried and smashed by hand with a few choice enhancers until it becomes a meal unto itself. The transformation approaches magic: a fruit that eats like a vegetable, its crushed garlic releasing aromas into the air as tantalizing as the wood smoke from a barbecue pit.
La Famosa is one chef’s love letter to his Puerto Rican home
What struck me about the mofongo at La Famosa in Navy Yard — this sophisticated space that feels at once urban and tropical — is how chef and co-owner Joancarlo Parkhurst left well enough alone. He has resisted all temptation to dress up the dish, as if rejecting the idea that mofongo needed a makeover for its appearance on his particular D.C. stage. When you order mofongo at La Famosa, it arrives not in a pilon, as you might find in Puerto Rico, but in a small caldero, topped with your choice of protein and served with a side of chicken broth.
“Mofongo has definitely done its own thing on Puerto Rico, and people are playing with it,” Parkhurst tells me. “My mofongos are very, very traditional.”
Parkhurst is a child of Puerto Rico, a native of Bayamón. But as a boy, he moved back and forth between New York City and the island, a foot squarely planted in each culture. He grew up with his maternal grandma’s rice and beans, and he’s managed Ruth’s Chris steakhouses as an adult. This synthesis of homestyle pleasures and white-china indulgences seemingly guides Parkhurst’s every decision at La Famosa. Except, it appears, for that mofongo.
Which may explain why I’m attracted to the dish: When digging into a bowl of shrimp mofongo on the patio at La Famosa, you’re as spiritually close to Puerto Rico as you can get in Washington, even with the imposing glass facade of the Twelve12 building sitting across the street. The mound of mashed fried plantains, draped with clean curls of shrimp sauteed in criollo sauce, is unapologetically — you might say gloriously — starchy. The dish’s personality almost defies tampering: It’s starchy despite Parkhurst’s generous application of chicken stock and mojo de ajo mixed into the mash.
Your level of mofongo appreciation may heightened by your relationship with its accompanying caldo de pollo, or chicken broth. Personally, I’m a broth dipper. I like to take a large forkful of mofongo and dip it, the flavors deepened and the starch cut with this thin sheen of stock. But Parkhurst? He treats the broth like spam: He ignores it. “I don’t caldo at all,” he says. “But there’s nothing wrong with caldo.”
La Famosa takes its name from a fruit and juice canning company founded in Puerto Rico by Parkhurst’s great-grandfather, a fact that helps to explain the fruit-centric iconography of the restaurant. Unlike a lot of establishments that have curtailed hours, a victim of the long tail of the pandemic, La Famosa remains faithful to its diner ambitions, offering food and drink for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The breakfast menu is a sleeper hit, thanks in large part to bakers Ada Enamorado and Noemi Bonilla, a pair of Salvadoran natives responsible for the biscuits, breads and pastries that give form to many of these bites. The mallorca bread, a pillowy coil sprinkled with powdered sugar, is a sweet treat with your morning joe, but it’s even better when wrapped around the savory fillings of a Mañanero ham, egg and cheese sandwich. And believe me, you’ll regret any breakfast that doesn’t include an order of pastelillo de guayaba, a puffy square of pastry concealing a cache of housemade guava paste.
The kitchen doesn’t produce its own pan de agua, a soft, pressed loaf that frames the tripleta, a sandwich named for its trio of meats: rib-eye, deli ham and the chef’s adobo-spiced roast pork shoulder, better known as pernil. Considered a worker’s sandwich on the island, the tripleta at La Famosa is slathered with mayo-ketchup, the classic Puerto Rican condiment, and garnished (if that’s the right word) with shoestring potatoes. Maybe too decadent for an office worker’s midday repast, but I’ll happily risk an afternoon knockout punch for this sandwich.
Curved lengths of plantain are fried, flattened and used as bread for the jibarito sandwich, which you can pack with either chicken or beef. Whichever way you go, the jibarito will overflow with not only meat but also pickled red onions and salsa verde, the latter two garnishes assigned the herculean task of counteracting the heavy starch of the plantains. They almost succeed. The mallorca bread makes a return appearance for what has to be the most unorthodox burger in D.C., the appropriately named El Gordito: a beef patty buried under ham, pernil, Swiss cheese and sweet plantains. It’s a head-fake of a burger, implying a standard American experience but delivering so much more.
I’ve developed an affection for a number of dishes at La Famosa — the chewy little bolitas de queso with guava sauce, the rich and rewarding carne guisada (a wintry stew that goes down well in summer) — but I really want to give a nod to Parkhurst’s ensalada tamarindo. This entree salad actually earns its status. Built with mixed greens, watermelon radishes, fried onions, tamarind-glazed shrimp and a tropical fruit salsa, the plate represents the pinnacle of salad engineering: a mess of greens that proves as indulgent as any red-meat dish. The salad is also something of a psychological breakthrough for the chef.
Because of the agricultural and political realities on the island, Parkhurst didn’t exactly grow up with salads. You might even say he used to have a bias against them based on his personal history. He certainly didn’t give much thought to salads at his previous restaurant, Lina’s Diner and Bar in Silver Spring.
“I think a lot of it has to do just with my own childhood trauma of being a forced vegetarian for the first 11 years of my life,” Parkhurst says. “But who am I to tell people how they’re going to eat? I think it’s a very hubristic way of approaching a menu.”
In that sense, La Famosa is not just Parkhurst’s embrace of Puerto Rican cooking, the kind that defined his childhood. It’s also his chance to help reshape it.
1300 Fourth St. SE, 202-921-9882; eatlafamosa.com.
Hours: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday and Monday, 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Nearest Metro: Navy Yard-Ballpark, with a short walk to the restaurant.
Prices: $3 to $38 for all items on the menu.
Source: WP
