Meet the jibarito

No city-dweller likes to have his Chicagoness questioned.

Windy City citizens can draw a map using deep-dish pizza spots. Chicagoans stand at least 25 feet away from a ketchup packet when wielding a hot dog. Italian beef? Yeah, they all got a guy.

The next lesson in Chicago food school is the jibarito (pronounced hee-bah-ree-toe), the Puerto Rican-inspired, Chicago-born plantain sandwich.

Conceived roughly 17 years ago by Juan "Peter" Figueroa, the co-owner of Borinquen Restaurant at 1720 N. California Ave., the sandwich is already a staple on the city's Northwest side.

"Everything, everything, everything [in Puerto Rico] is involved with platanos," said Borinquen Restaurant co-owner Jaime Figueroa. "When [Juan and my father] came over here to Chicago, my father said, ‘Why don't we do a platano sandwich here? We can sell this idea.'"

The first, and most popular, was the steak jibarito. Other variations are chicken, pork and veggie. The sandwich is made with a strip of meat (avocado is used on the veggie sandwich), tomatoes, lettuce, mayonnaise and American cheese. All stacked between the defining characteristic of the jibarito—two thinly sliced and twice-deepfried plantains as bread.

"We peel the platano, cut it in half, put in oil, pull it out and smash it—we make it real skinny," Figueroa said. "We put it back in the oil again until it's crispy."

Soon after the first jibarito debuted, a handful of other Logan Square and Humboldt Park Puerto Rican restaurants caught on.

"I told my brother, ‘Get it patented,' but he forgot to do it and everybody makes a jibarito now," said Figueroa. "A lot of [restaurants] survive because of the jibarito. They're still in business because of it."

The spot claiming the "best jibarito sandwich" with a neon sign in its front window is Puerto Rican restaurant Cocina Boricua at 2410 W. Fullerton Ave.

"I heard about it, went over [to Borinquen] and tried it. We make it better," said Eddie Gararza, owner of Cocina Boricua, laughing. "In this business, you never stay still. You see what the people are doing and what the people like and try to make it better."

Making it better, for Gararza, only means searching for the highest quality ingredients. The differences between Gararza's and the Figueroa's jibarito are minimal.

"I use white American cheese, and [Borinquen] uses yellow," said Gararza. "But the recipe is the same."

From the neon sign to the photo of a jibarito in the window, on the front of the menu and restaurant business card, Cocina Boricua now promotes the sandwich as its specialty. It quickly became the restaurant's most requested dish.

"See that whole table over there?" asked Maria Ramirez, a Cocina Boricua server for 19 years, pointing to a party of 12 customers. "They're all eating jibaritos."

The steak jibarito is the restaurant's number one seller. The same is true at Borinquen and La Palma Restaurant at 1340 N. Homan Ave.

"It's our most popular, we've been selling it for 12 years," said Jenny Garcia, manager at La Palma. "Other places give one slab of meat. We don't weigh our steak, so you get more. The customers always come back because they say it's better."

Another popular variation La Palma sells is the jibarita, which uses sweet plantains that are only deep-fried once, versus the twice-fried green, unripe plantains. Borinquen and Sabor Latina at 3810 W. North Ave. also offer the jibarita, according to Garcia.

Though the jibarito is served exclusively at Puerto Rican restaurants and has influences from the island, Figueroa insists the jibarito has a stronger connection to Chicago.

"If you ate a jibarito in Puerto Rico, everybody would be like, ‘Oh, you come from Chicago, huh?'" said Figueroa, who, among his six brothers, two sisters and parents, came to Chicago from Utuado, Puerto Rico.

Gararza, who immigrated to Chicago from Lajas, Puerto Rico, in 1946, believes they didn't know about it in Puerto Rico but "probably have it by now." Garcia also heard the sandwich is a foreign concept on the island and is only available in Chicago.

"It's a part of Chicago. Some guys tried to make it in Florida, but they tell me they can't make it the same," said Figueroa. "I get people from East Coast, California, Miami. I even got a guy here that says he saw the sandwich in a travel magazine. He said, ‘I come from France, I want to taste the sandwich.' […] He liked it."

Juan Figueroa named the sandwich the jibarito, which literally means "little people from the country, like the Puerto Rican hillbilly," Figueroa said, laughing. "The farmers in the country, the hillbillies, they grow the plant."

A common misconception of the Puerto Rican dish is that it's comparable to a Mexican taco but with plantains. Gararza shook his head, explaining that the "Puerto Rican cooking style is more like Spain" and that Mexicans use small bits of meat, whereas Puerto Ricans use large chunks.

What's not hard to recognize is the nutritional value of a meaty sandwich with cheese and mayo between two twice-deepfried slabs of a potato-like crop.

A jibarito recipe on Allrecipes.com claims 1219 calories and 100 grams of fat.

"I have a customer that was so slim, now she's heavy. Jibaritos are her favorite," said Garcia. "She says she's going to stop eating them, but I doubt it."

"All I know is it's fattening. If you're on a diet and you want a jibarito? No way," Garcia said. "Hell no."