Chocobar Cortés, a Beloved Restaurant from San Juan, Heads for the Bronx

“You have to see chocolate as a condiment and not as a candy,” said Maria Martínez, the chef of Chocobar Cortés NYC, who was born in Brooklyn but raised in Quebradillas, in northwest Puerto Rico. Her mofongo at Café Ghia, a Bushwick, Brooklyn, restaurant that closed in 2017, regularly drew long lines every morning.

In a phone interview from his home in San Juan, Ignacio Cortés, Carlos’s father and the company’s chief executive, said Cortés chocolate has been available in the United States in scattered groceries and bodegas since 1951, and is now distributed in 20 states. “We are a reference for the first and second generations who came to New York,” he said, “a reference to what they left and what they long for.”

Pablo García Smith, who offers food tours of San Juan, said that Chocobar serves as “a generational bridge,” linking abuelas with young people and Instagram influencers. “The restaurants — in San Juan and now in New York — close the loop of nostalgia.” (Last summer, Cortés sold chocolate bars wrapped in comic strips of La Borinqueña, an Afro-Puerto Rican superhero created in 2016.)

The Mott Haven neighborhood has experienced a rush of development from within the community, or “gentefication,” from the Spanish word “gente” (people). Chocobar shares a block with the Lit. Bar, a wine bar and a much-needed bookstore; Beatstro, a hip-hop bistro that hosts break-dancing battles; Famous Nobodys, a streetwear boutique; and the Thinkubator, a job training nonprofit that’s about to open a cafe.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/dining/chocobar-cortes-chocolate-nyc.html