Pioneering Sonoma County Puerto Rican restaurant El Coqui survives and thrives

Jackie Roman steered a flat cartload of supplies off the street and into El Coqui, the downtown Santa Rosa Puerto Rican restaurant she co-founded in 2009.

Abruptly, she planted herself in front of the cart, using her body to shield it from a reporter’s view. She absolutely was not kidding.

“I don’t want people to know what I use,” said Roman, a husky-voiced New York City native who spent her childhood summers in Puerto Rico learning how to cook from her abuela. She acknowledged — grudgingly — that the jars and boxes on the cart contained proprietary ingredients but would disclose nothing more.

Maybe that’s what it takes to open Sonoma County’s first Puerto Rican restaurant during the Great Recession and still be around 14 years later: being tough-minded about sharing your trade secrets.

Certainly, it took guts and gumption to plunge into an industry that’s unforgiving at the best of times.

Home cooking turns into a business

Sometime in 2007 or 2008, Roman, then a restaurant supplies salesperson, and her close friend and eventual El Coqui co-founder, Tina Jackson, then a bank manager, were hanging out at Lake Sonoma with family and friends. Everyone always loved Roman’s cooking so talk, of course, turned to her and Jackson opening a restaurant.

“I was, like, OK, whatever,” Roman, 55, said, seated in the space El Coqui has recently expanded into, which is next door to its longtime home on the corner of Mendocino Avenue and Fifth Street. “It was just playing around.”

“It was just b******* talk,” said Jackson, a Rancho Cotate High School graduate.

Nevertheless, the pair of perhaps-we-should-be-restaurateurs started checking out empty storefronts — nursing an idea that maybe they’d open a sports bar or a pizza place.

On Craigslist, they learned about a Petaluma restaurant that was closing and bought all its tables, chairs and refrigerators using credit card transfer balances — something generally recommended against when you’re just musing about launching a restaurant.

“Crazy,” said Jackson, 51, looking back with a smile.

Furniture and refrigerators in hand, Jackson said she eventually looked at her business partner and said, “Just take the sports bar out and focus on what you do best and be yourself. This is what you cook at home, this is what you do.”

“And then,” Roman said, ”it was real.“

El Coqui opened in June 2009 with a line around the block.

Bringing Jayuya to Santa Rosa

The restaurant’s walls are painted burnt orange and display a portrait of Tito Puente, the famed Puerto Rican Latin jazz composer, as well as license plates emblazoned with the names of Puerto Rican locales, and illustrations of the Puerto Rican tree frog the restaurant is named for. They chose the name because the frogs chirp or whistle, rather than croak, and “they kind of bring the rain forest there alive,” Jackson said.

On the walls are also other scenes from the Caribbean island’s markets and streets. Conga drums sit on a shelf behind the bar. A Puerto Rican flag decorates the door to the restroom. And, on one afternoon, Héctor Lavoe’s “El Dia de mi Suerte” — My Lucky Day — was playing.

It’s not known whether they were on the cart of ingredients, but one thing Roman did share is that every three or four months she gets 100 pounds of aji dulce — a bright red Caribbean pepper — shipped from a Puerto Rican farmers’ market to make her sofrito, typically a blend of ingredients including onions, garlic, cilantro and browned peppers colored with annatto seed.

Along with plantains that Roman sources from Ecuador, sofrito is the foundation of Puerto Rican cuisine.

“Without that, you can’t really have the taste of Puerto Rico,” said Roman.

It’s not spicy, though, because, as Roman is quick to point out: “Puerto Rican food is not hot. Puerto Rican food is a lot of flavor.”

Her grandmother lived in the village of Jayuya, on Puerto Rico’s highest mountain, on land filled with acres of mangoes, coffee, avocados and tomatoes. Her house, which is featured in a mural decorating the restaurant’s expanded space, had wooden shutters and no electricity. Meals were cooked outside over a fire — on an outdoor stove called a fogon — and everyone showered under a nearby waterfall.

“It connects me very spiritually,” Roman said, recalling her youth and reflecting on her present. “Everything that I've learned made me who I am now, here, for El Coqui. To give that piece of a taste of Puerto Rico to Sonoma County. “I always tell people, you know, ‘Maybe this was my inheritance.’ I guess this is what they left me behind because out of all the brothers and sisters, I was the only one in the kitchen.”

Tough critics and loyal fans

Jackson runs the El Coqui’s front house, manages the finances and the staff of 17 full and part time employees. The back of the house belongs to Roman.

Her kitchen, with a 10-burner stove and two ovens, is tight quarters.

On a Monday afternoon, two line cooks and a dishwasher stayed busy between the lunch rush and dinner hour.

An Uber Eats order for her ever-popular pollo al horno — baked chicken thighs — came in through a machine on a shelf above the stainless steel prep station that keeps the staple rice and beans hot.

“Este para llevar,” Roman said to one of the cooks, “This is to-go.”

Then it was on to another of menu staple, a sweet plantain stuffed with piccadillo — a ground beef combination of 10 not-to-be-disclosed ingredients.

She nonchalantly slices the plantain down the middle, leaving it just barely attached, and places it in a deep fryer next to the stove. Then, it will be ladled full of piccadillo and topped with melted Monterey Jack cheese.

Called canoa (canoe, in English), it has dedicated fans — even beyond the roughly 250 Puerto Rican natives who, according to the U.S. Census, call Sonoma County home.

“Oh, my God, have you tried the canoa, which is the sweet plantains with the Angus? Oh, my God, it is amazing,” said Marisol Morales, an Orlando, Florida, resident, who first tried El Coqui in 2018 and now visits two or three times a year.

“It makes me feel like home,” said Morales, 50, who is Puerto Rican and, like Roman, was raised in New York but spent her childhood summers on the island. “To find a place that actually lives up to its name and its reputation was shocking, because usually you go to these places that are like, ‘It's authentic, this and that,’ and when you taste it, no, it's not. Especially when you're Puerto Rican, you know. But this place actually was really, really good. It brought me so many memories of my family.”

As with Morales, Puerto Ricans are some of El Coqui’s biggest fans. They can also be its toughest critics, Jackson said.

“Straightaway it’s to the authenticity question, you know, is the food authentic? You know, ‘My grandmother didn’t cook red beans. My grandmother cooked black beans. Pink beans,’ Jackson said. “So right away, if I feel like I've got a tough customer, I'm like, ‘OK, I can't send the white owner over, you know? Go get Jackie so she can go be Puerto Rican, please.’ And then, sure enough, by the time those customers are leaving … now it's the best Puerto Rican food they've ever had.”

'Nothing's going to slow me down’

The bonds that Roman and Jackson have cultivated with their customers have helped them thrive.

Once a month, Roman drives to Pinole, where a former Puerto Rican customer lives in an assisted-living facility. There, she caters a meal for the East Bay residents.

Roman and Jackson also make monthly visits to a group of several dozen Puerto Rican women in the North Bay who dubbed themselves the Hermanitas Club — the little sisters club — and when they were younger, used to gather at El Coqui.

“We sing all the Puerto Rican songs, we do jokes,” Roman said.

“They’re dancing in their wheelchairs,” Jackson added.

For El Coqui’s owners, the work rarely stops. This year, the restaurant grew with the addition of the neighboring space, which they use for overflow and special events like banquets and birthday parties.

“The fact of the matter is, it’s 24 hours,” Jackson said.

“Twenty-four,” Roman said.

“A lot of times we’ll leave here at 8:30, 9:30, 10:30, 11:30 p.m. and we’ll get home …” Jackson said.

“And another two to three … “ Roman added.

“Hours, you know,” Jackson said. “Then it's, ‘OK, well, I didn't do this. I've got to order this.’ And she's got to call in for the produce order for the delivery. And then we're going to look at the reports and then, of course, everything's automated now on your phone, so you start getting all your phone alerts. ‘Oh, your credit card transactions just batched (were put through by the credit card company). Then, ‘It's midnight, put it away.’ You know what I mean? It's 24 hours. Somebody's calling and saying, ‘I don't think I'm going to make it to work tomorrow,’ you know?”

Roman said, ”I'm an owner-chef. But I'm part of the team no matter what … Just because you're an owner, you're not higher. We're equal. We’re all the same, right? That's how I feel. You know what I'm saying?

“You see me back there. I'm scrubbing. I'm doing. I'm cooking. I'm doing everything. I'm prepping. I'm here two or three in the morning, if I have to,” she said. “And I have to come in at six in the morning, five in the morning to start cooking, I do it, too, because I'm not afraid. Nothing's going to slow me down except when I be six feet under.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jeremy Hay at 707-387-2960 or jeremy.hay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @jeremyhay