New Brunswick Restaurant Week: La Frontera Caribeña is Building a Community of Latino Flavors

Considering Christian Gonzalez has a long background in the construction business, it's not surprising he's using his restaurant to help build something: a sense of community.

In the year since he and his wife, Lidia, bought La Frontera Caribeña Restaurant at 90 Remsen Ave., he's added some traditional dishes his family brought with them from their native Puerto Rico, such as mofongo, to a menu already filled with Colombian and Venezuelan specialties.

He brought in artist Daniel Lopez Espinoza to create vivid murals on the restaurant walls depicting traditional Mexican dancers, Caribbean birds of paradise, the Puerto Rican flag and other nods to various Latino cultures.

He even tacked on the "Caribeña" part to the restaurant's original name in an attempt to wrap his arms around even more Latino cultures in and around the neighborhood.

"This is called La Frontera Caribeña, and frontera means the border (in Spanish) and Caribeña means the Caribbean," he said. "The border is like Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and all those other beautiful countries, right? And then Caribbean means Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Jamaica.

"So you bring all these nationalities together, and then we don't feel like we have borders. We feel like we're all one, like we should be."

The Gonzalezes are inviting people from all these cultures to come and try their dishes made from scratch using fresh ingredients and bold flavors during New Brunswick Restaurant Week.

The restaurant that serves up heaping helpings of empanadas, delicious shish kebabs and overstuffed cachapas will offer 15% off its lunch and dinner plates.

New Brunswick Restaurant Week runs for two weeks, from July 12 through July 25, during which dozens of restaurants throughout the city offer specially priced meals, prix fixe menus, complimentary appetizers or desserts and even drink specials.

New Brunswick City Market is also running a promotion on its social media channels and Facebook event page for a chance to win dining gift cards from participating businesses between July 12 and July 25. It will be running multiple contests, giving diners opportunities to win gift certificates and enjoy a meal at one of its featured restaurants. (Mail‑in entries close at 11:59 p.m., Monday, Aug. 3.)

Diners who eat out seven times during New Brunswick Restaurant Week at participating establishments can enter for a chance to win gift certificates from local restaurants.

Gonzalez didn't harbor dreams of being a restaurateur, although his childhood home was always filled with the aroma of freshly cooked food.

Rather, he's been into construction for years, and now owns and operates CNG Roofing.

Life has been busy since he bought the restaurant from a friend about a year ago.

Gonzalez spent the early part of one recent morning checking on the progress of a construction job his crew is tackling on Livingston Avenue, and was hoping to find time to give someone an estimate on some roof repairs. In between, he stopped into the restaurant to see how things were going.

Although he has already made several big changes to La Frontera Caribeña, like enlisting the help of Rutgers students working throughout Unity Square to paint some tropical scenes on the exterior of the restaurant, more are on the way. A new sign adding the caribeña part of the restaurant's name is in the works. He is going to add hanging lights in the back of the dining area.

Outside the back of the restaurant, he lifts the covering off a commercial roaster he recently purchased for about $1,500. Soon, he will be roasting pigs and maybe some goats. In fact, the back area will be covered by canopies and converted into a semi-outdoor lounge with strings of lights, music, a large screen TV, some tables where guests can play dominoes.

Gonzalez said the best part of running La Frontera Caribeña has been getting to know the customers, some of whom come in almost every day. For those customers, he and Lidia remember precisely how to prepare their, say, camarones a la crema (shrimp in white cream sauce) or their bistec encebollado (steak with onions).

The one thing he couldn't have known when he bought the restaurant, though, is how the specter of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in and around Remsen Street has hurt his business.

"We've got a lot of people who don't want to come out because of ICE," Gonzalez said. "A lot of this community here are Latino, so the people that do want to come, they don't want to come out because they don't know if they're going to get attacked or whatever.

"So, we went from doing great sales, and now it's just meh. We're just borderline right now. We're just getting by. I mean, the weekends are our strong days, so that's when we balance our week. And some people order since we deliver. This way they don't have to go out."

Story & Photo Credit: Chuck O'Donnell