On the heels of Hispanic Heritage Month, here are a few spots to celebrate the rich diversity of Latin culinary culture in the region

If migration and diaspora are associated with bringing a wealth of gastronomic diversity to regions, then it’s no surprise that the growth of the Hispanic population in Southwest and southern Virginia has translated into a vibrant community, spurring a tasty stratification of Hispanic eateries.

The Hispanic population in the commonwealth has expanded exponentially in number and diversity over the last 10 years, according to the U.S. Census. Increasing significantly from 2010 to 2020, the population grew by 44% in Virginia, bringing the numbers up from 631,825 to 908,749. 

According to Virginia.gov, an overwhelming number of Latino immigrants in the state come from Mexico and El Salvador, but gastronomic offerings in the area speak to a more expansive diversity of Latino foodways that include Cuban, Peruvian and Puerto Rican cuisine, to name a few.

While Northern Virginia boasts the largest Hispanic population in the state, Roanoke claims one of the largest Hispanic populations in southern and western portions of Virginia. The Williamson Road corridor is known for its concentration of Hispanic businesses, boasting a 15% Hispanic population, which is 5% higher than the state overall. 

Read on below for a few examples of where to experience the wide range of Latino gastronomy in Southwest and Southside, with origins in places running the gamut from the Caribbean to the cities and towns of Central America. Since music is fundamental to experiencing Latin culture, read on below for some sonic pairings to accompany the culinary journey.

It all started with a pool party

Karyna Nevarez and her husband, Carlos, saw an opportunity to plan the beginnings of their restaurant — Delicias Boricuas — during the pandemic. Boricua is a reference to Borikén, the word that the Indigenous Taíno peoples used to refer to Puerto Rico. The word translates to “the land of the valiant and noble lord.”  

Before the couple opened their brick-and-mortar space in Roanoke, the Nevarezes did a soft launch at a friend’s pool party, and metaphorically speaking, it’s been raining sofrito — the flavorful building block of onions, peppers, garlic and herbs — ever since.

That soft launch was so popular, “We never got a chance to do a grand opening,” Karyna Nevarez said. Now Roanokers have the opportunity to savor the nuances of Puerto Rican cuisine any time they want. 

Unlike other Hispanic cuisine that may be known for a spicy kick, Nevarez says that Puerto Rican food does not have a legacy of hot and spicy seasoning. 

“Puerto Rican food is not hot at all,” she said. “There’s nothing spicy about it, nothing hot.”

Everything relies on sofrito, which is fundamentally a marriage of oil, onions and peppers to impart flavor of aromatic seasonings. 

The Nevarezes make their own sofrito, and it’s available for purchase at the restaurant. While recipes vary, theirs consists mostly of “onions, garlic, cilantro, red, yellow, and green peppers, oregano, and some herbs and a dash of olive oil.” 

“It’s probably one of the most important things we use in our cooking,” Nevarez said.

Another staple of Puerto Rican cuisine is rice and beans.

“The whole culture runs around rice and beans,” said Nevarez. Meal planning in a Puerto Rican household comes down to a question of deciding what kind of meat to accompany the rice and beans, she said.

 “We know it’s going to be rice and beans with something, that’s very cultural,” she said. 

For Nevarez, the pork at the restaurant is a point of pride and a cultural marker. “We put a lot of dedication into [cooking] it,” she said. “We are very, very proud of our pork.”

A symphony of cultures

At Inka Grill in Lynchburg, customer Dan Davis from Appomattox County, is all about the beef. He has visited Peru and deemed the lomo saltado — a dish of sliced beef, peppers, onions, tomatoes and potatoes — authentic and “just like you would get in Peru.”

All  seven Inka Grill locations offer a culinary mashup of Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and African food traditions that is the adventure of Peruvian cuisine.

Percy Moreno, the owner of the original location in Roanoke, cut his culinary teeth at restaurants in Costa Rica, eventually hopping to Orlando, Florida, and later Miami where he had the opportunity to work in fine dining establishments. Each place he went followed the same rhythm: work in someone else’s established restaurant and then open a Peruvian-inspired place of his own.

Alex Soto, general manager of the Lynchburg location, said a lot of the staff from all the locations bring experience from cruise lines and bigger cities like New York where volume is high and high quality is expected.

Soto recommends the bistec a lo pobre, two pieces of skirt steak and sweet fried plantains with tacu tacu — a loaf of fried rice and beans — topped with an egg cooked so precisely that upon breaking, the yolk drips like candlewax over the rice loaf.  It’s a bit of a tongue-and-cheek act naming the dish “poor man’s steak” with a dish so rich in flavor.

All in the family

In Blacksburg, Yasmin Marisela Olivares Alvarenga’s whole family is part of the workings of her restaurant, Pupuseria Mari II. While her husband runs their original location that opened in March 2022 in Christiansburg, now her four kids help out on a daily basis at the Blacksburg restaurant, which opened in October 2023, attending to customers in between algebra and other homework.

Pupuseria Mari II serves the savory pastries most closely associated with food from El Salvador: pupusas. 

“A lot of people don’t know what pupusas are,” she said. “Some people think they’re arepas or a gorditas like they call them in México. People should come here to see for themselves. They’re really good,” she said in Spanish.

The proper way to eat a pupusa, according to Olivares Alvarenga, is to split apart the round filled cake and top it with red pickled onions and a hot sauce and eat it like a taco.

Olivares Alvarenga also sells Mexican fare like tacos, burritos and tamales.

For her though, “pupusas siempre,” she says: Always pupusas.

The flavors of Peru in Blacksburg

Blacksburg is no stranger to student startup food businesses. Undergrads Sebastián Villena and his partner Victor Jiménez are both studying business and marketing at Virginia Tech and manage The Burg in downtown Blacksburg. 

And The Burg is about as ambitious as a final exam in Latin cuisine and restaurant management can get. 

Both hail from Peru, Villena from Lima and Jiménez from the coastal town of Callao. Both are 24 years old. Villena learned about the hospitality business from his dad, who used to run restaurants in Lima, he said. He’s also had stints at local Blacksburg restaurants, gleaning what he could from those experiences and putting that knowledge to work at The Burg.

Villena ended up in Blacksburg partly because his cousin, who was getting his doctorate at Virginia Tech, needed a roommate. He also saw an opportunity to chase his dream of starting a business. He applied to the university, and when he was accepted, he relocated to Blacksburg from Lima. 

Before he moved to the U.S., Villena met Jiménez at a party. The two remained in contact over social media but were not close. A serendipitous peek on Instagram during a family trip to Baltimore showed Jiménez that Villena was in Blacksburg. Jiménez reached out and Villena invited him down for a football weekend. A month later, the two were housemates, ultimately becoming business partners.

“We’re very student-oriented,” Jiménez said, citing the fact that the restaurant hosts sorority and fraternity functions, and adding that they like to present the The Burg as an event space. According to Villena, a couple has even held their wedding ceremony there.

The two also use their classroom training in marketing to run the promotional aspects of the business, like keeping their robust social media accounts populated and polling focus groups for insights into customer preferences.

Villena says in large part they are responding to what the market lacked downtown: a place to enjoy Latin-inspired food, and also to dance. 

“In Latin America it is very common to have somewhere to eat and also dance,” he said. 

The restaurant leans heavily on Peruvian dishes. Before The Burg opened, Villena’s mother trekked from Lima to help teach chefs how to cook Peruvian dishes such as aji de gallina, a creamy yellow pepper chicken dish, and lomo saltado, a beefy stir-fry, over three months. The kitchen also serves pan-Latin cooking and libations that cover a wide swath of North and South America, including an assortment of tacos from Mexico, and Argentinian empanadas.

La Isla Bonita 

Miami may have Little Havana and Calle Ocho, but in Roanoke, there is the oasis of Cuban victuals that is Cuban Island. 

Manager José Samuel Ponce likes to say that the coffee beans for the traditional Cuban espresso come straight “from the tree to you.” 

Guests at Cuban Island can get their island fix in the form of sugar-sweetened café Cubano for an afternoon pick-me-up or a classic dish of ropa vieja, a tomato-stewed beef, alongside dishes of sweet, caramelized plantains and congris, black beans and rice.

Ponce runs the cafe, which was voted one of the top 25 Cuban restaurants in America in 2023 by enjoytravel.com, with his sister, who serves guests, and brother-in-law, who works as the chef. 

He and his family are Honduran but have honed their craft over the past 14 years, learning from the previous owners, Estela Gonzalez and her husband, Manuel Hidalgo, who fled Cuba in 1994. 

Cuban Island opened in 2010, and while Gonzalez and her husband have retired from the business, Ponce and his family keep the kitchen pass churning with dishes made from the recipes that Gonzalez learned from her grandmother growing up on the Caribbean’s largest island. 

Dessert is also an homage to the Gonzalez’s culinary legacy and includes postres of flan and varieties of tres leches cake in tropical-forward fruits like pineapple and coconut, and a nod to the cacao plant in chocolate pineapple. 

Cuban Island is an experience in and of itself. The philodendron in the restaurant is also notably 14 years old, and its verdant tendrils have grown to encompass a large part of the dining area along with other greenery that adorns the space.

Don’t be surprised if you feel an ocean breeze through your hair as the aroma of espresso wafts through the air and you start chair dancing to the salsa on the stereo system.

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