- Ladies and gentlemen,
we are exiting the city of Miami proper.
We are headed to the city of Doral.
We're gonna try an entire roasted pig.
This guy we're about to talk to right now,
Victor Alvarez has opened La Esquina del Lechon.
Probably one of the best places to have
traditional Cuban Lechon
which is an 80/90 pound pig
that is gonna be marinated,
slow-roasted for hours,
and it's gonna be crisped up to make that skin
nice and crispy.
It's gonna be served with some plantains, rice and beans.
So we're gonna head there right now
and we're gonna see what's going on at
La Esquina del Lechon
and we're gonna try some of this delicious pig.
(gentle music)
How does a guy from Venezuela
end up making this Cuban style roast pork?
- Well I've always been a pork fanatic
and I love my pork in many different ways
and when I travel,
I'm always drawn to new ways to cook pork
and new recipes for pork.
I've always been attracted to the food business.
When I was still in college,
I had a Subway shop,
from Subway franchises.
- You had Subway franchises in college?
- At the end of my college years, yes.
- Wow.
So you always knew you wanted to go into business?
- I had.
A lot of times people say
"Oh you must have started in diapers."
- What do you think is the secret to really doing it well?
- The pork, you have to go slow.
If you try to rush it you're either gonna burn the skin,
or the muscle is gonna tense up.
So you gotta go 180/200
and just be patient.
- Low and slow.
- Low and slow, yes.
We marinate it for three days.
We do our own Mojo with garlic and salt and pepper
and sour orange.
And then we set it on the cage
and we cook it at 6:30 in the morning
and we time it so that it's ready for 12:45-1 o'clock.
And then we serve it through the lobby.
It became a little bit of a show
and I wanted to give it the importance of
hey, break up the meeting you're having on your table,
check out what's happening here at the door.
We'll bring in a freshly cooked
roasted pork that we've been cooking for six hours.
A lot of customers get up and take pictures
and they take pictures with the pig.
So I didn't want the guests to miss that opportunity
and now it's a tradition 11 years later.
(soft hip hop music)
- Oh man, this looks - Are you hungry?
- amazing, yes.
- Are you hungry for pork?
- Holy (bleep).
Excuse my language. - Here's your
roasted pork
en caja china style.
The sides are your traditional Moro rice,
yuca and we like to grind chicharrones and put it on top.
Maduros and green plantain mariquitas.
- I'm dumbfounded
by how beautiful this is.
This is taking me no effort at all
to pull this apart.
This is very delicious.
Very tender, very juicy,
perfectly cooked pork.
The primary flavor is gonna be that bitter orange
that goes into the marinade.
Gonna break some of the skin for you.
It's crunchy.
It snaps in your mouth.
Like glassy peanut brittle,
but it's still got that really intense pork flavor.
You've got some grilled onions.
You're gonna have that nice sweet bitter flavor.
It's so good.
I'm gonna create my perfect bite here.
I'm gonna get a little bit of skin,
a little bit of meat,
and then an onion.
You get a contrast of flavors and textures,
super crunchy skin,
juicy tender meat,
that kind of sour snap of the onions.
There are sauces on the table,
and I'm sure these sauces are nice,
I'm not trying to diss the sauces,
but it doesn't need sauce.
It needs absolutely nothing.
This is pork perfection at its finest
right here on the table.
I really don't see how you could improve on that.
It's so good.
I mean after that,
poor plantain chip,
how are these gonna?
I mean, delightful,
but,
it's not the pork.
I'm gonna take a little beverage break.
Yerba Mate Soda.
Why not?
If this is at all like my previous experiences
with Latin American sodas,
it's gonna be really sweet,
taste a little bit like bumble gum,
and I'm not gonna want to finish it.
So let's find out.
Yep.
It does have a vague
Yerba Mate,
so sort of like an earthy flavor.
Not really my thing.
Doesn't matter.
The pork is delicious.
Let's move on to some of these side dishes.
We have these plantains.
We've had plantains before on the show.
It's like a dense starchy banana.
Very delicious.
It's got the nice caramelization around the edges.
Moving on we've got some yuca.
A potato-like starchy root vegetable.
It's gonna be more stringy,
but you could totally make fries out of yuca
like you were making french fries
and it would practically taste like the same thing.
And so in this case,
these are just nicely boiled.
What the potatoes are to the Europeans,
the yuca is to Latin America/Caribbean.
It's a starch.
It's a carbohydrate.
It's good.
And this is the Moro.
This is just gonna be white rice
that has been cooked with these black beans
so it infuses that nice color,
that nice earthy flavor into the rice.
Then it's also cooked with some pork
so that's gonna have that flavor as well.
The sides, delightful,
but it's all about this pig.
It's not called La Esquina del Lechon,
The Corner of the Pig,
for nothing.
The fact that he's won over
the die-hard Cubans
in like the most Cuban city in America,
to get people to come to eat his Cuban roast pig here.
The fact that he is from Venezuela
and the fact that this place is crushing it like it is,
shows you that this really is the best.
That tells you it's good
and I'm telling you right now,
that it's super good.
It's just incredible.
I really hope you enjoyed this episode of
Dining on a Dime from La Esquina del Lechon
in Doral Miami, Florida.
If you'd like to watch more,
please click here.
I'm sorry by the way.
I'm sorry about this.