Indeed, the coqui is a little frog commonly found in Puerto Rico, and the visitor’s reaction when he saw the name of the place is not the first of its kind that Diego and Nazario have witnessed. “Puerto Ricans feel offended because the coqui is from Puerto Rico,” said Danisha Nazario, 35, who owns the restaurant along with Alfredo Diego, 39.

Offended national pride aside, however, Melrose residents as well as those who work in the area have adopted the little restaurant, which opened two years ago. And as far as its owners are concerned, the name is a symbol of the fusion of cultures represented on the restaurant’s menu.

In addition to such well-known Mexican and Puerto Rican specials as tacos, plantain-leaf-wrapped tamales, and arroz con habichuelas–the Puerto Rican version of rice and beans—the restaurant serves dishes from far-flung Latin cuisines. For instance, instead of the typical Peruvian ceviche, they serve an Acapulco-style ceviche—made with Mexican jalapeño peppers.

Other specialties include Salvadoran pupusas—corn tortillas filled with chorizo and cheese, among other ingredients—and a salad of Chayota squash. Desserts include Piña Colada pie and guava and cheese muffins.

Like its name and its offerings, the proprietors are the result of cultural fusion: Nazario is Puerto Rican, Diego Mexican, and they serve a neighborhood that has become home to many Puerto Ricans and Mexicans.

The proprietors have lived in the area for nine years. Diego always wanted to own a business where he could serve people. He and Nazario put together $18,000 in savings, borrowed more and began to scout for a place to open a restaurant.

“We looked for places in Brooklyn and East Harlem but they were too expensive,” said Nazario. Then they learned that that the out of business deli not far away from their apartment was available and thought that it would make sense to invest in the neighborhood.

Coqui Mexicano has three tables and three chairs by the bar. Hanging on the turquoise walls are pictures of President Barack Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, along with a picture of Diego posing with Congressman Jose E. Serrano.

Since they couldn’t afford to hire a cook, Diego took over the kitchen, and remains responsible for all the cooking. However, Nazario says his true calling is to interact with patrons. “Diego lives to be surrounded by people,” she said.

“We say this is not a restaurant; it is not a bodega; it is more like a community center,” said Nazario.

The couple wants to provide residents with services that are scarce in the area. Not only does the restaurant sell food made from fresh vegetables, but also crafts made by locals.

And customers can take books home for free.  Finding that there were no bookstores in the neighborhood, the couple decided to collect used titles and placed them on a shelf next to the entrance.

“Reading should not be a luxury,” the owners say on the restaurant website. “Books can be expensive and during these hard times, why should we not learn how to share with each other?”

Coqui’s customers include police officers from the nearby 42nd Precinct, construction workers and teachers from area schools.

“Eighty percent of my employees come here to have lunch,” said Bobby, 46, who works in construction and refused to give his last name because of his company’s policies. The restaurant “sells what we really need.”

Prices are affordable: tacos and tamales sell for $2.50, desserts for $3, and a plate of arroz con habichuelas with a side of meat for $5.

However, Diego and Nazario are struggling to keep Coqui Mexicano in business.  The salary that Nazario makes as a hotel employee is their main capital. “The place doesn’t make enough money to sustain itself,” said Nazario.

In May, when Nazario and Diego fell behind on the rent and received a notice of eviction from their landlord, patrons, including Congressman Serrano, signed petitions to keep Coqui Mexicano open. The restaurant’s owners and their landlord agreed to a six-month payment plan, and visitors have continued enjoying Coqui’s food.

They’ve pinned their hopes on nearby Boricua Village on East 163d Street and Third Avenue. The complex, scheduled to open soon, will include 750 apartments, Boricua College, with an enrollment of 2,400 students and 40,000 square feet of retail space that should bring plenty of foot traffic to the area.

In the meantime, the owners are coping with hard times. “We still owe six thousand dollars of the late rent,” said Diego.

The Cemita, a sandwich filled with avocado, chipotle chili, an herb called Papalo, Oaxaca cheese and chicken or meat, is one of the Mexican city’s typical treats.

“It brings me back so many memories. I remember when I use to work in a car factory back in Mexico and had Cemita for lunch,” said Sanchez, 51, who has been living in the U.S. for nine years.

Sanchez is one of the many immigrants from Puebla who have found a home in Mott Haven.

As the number of Mexican residents has grown, so have the number of Mexican restaurants and delis. But only La Fiesta Mexicana on East 138th Street offers the authentic Cemita Poblana, Sanchez said.

“Before this place opened I could never eat Cemita. I didn’t know where to find it,” he said.

Laurentino Mendez, 43, and his brother Juan, opened La Fiesta one year ago.

“We are from Puebla, so for us it was an obvious choice to include Cemita in the menu,” says Mendez, who has 12 years of experience working in Italian and French restaurants.

Mendez makes Cemita with the speed of a McDonald’s employee packing up a burger. He takes the round-shaped bread, slices it in two and places it on the grill. Then, he spreads a chipotle mix, puts the milanesa (breaded chicken or meat) in, and adds the cheese, papalo leaves and slices of avocado.

The result leaves Sanchez satisfied. “I have Cemita at least once a week,” he said.

“People come from Brooklyn and Queens to buy Cemita. On a good day I can make up to 30,” Mendez said.

La Fiesta Mexicana offers nine kinds of Cemita in their menu. There’s the “Hawaian Cemita,” filled with pineapple; the “Cemita Al Pastor” with meat, onions, pineapple and chipotle; and “Las Carnitas Cubanas” which includes three types of meat.

But the main ingredient of the Cemita, according to Mendez, is the special type of bread from which the sandwich takes its name.“We make the bread in my brother’s bakery,” he said.

Angel Alvarez, 40, is the baker who makes La Fiesta Mexicana Cemitas at La Casa del Latino Grocery located a block from Mendez’s restaurant.

“It has flour, oil, a bit of salt, a bit of sugar and sesame seeds on top,” Alvarez said. “This kind of bread is only used for making Cemitas sandwiches.”

Mendez buys the bread daily, so Sanchez and others like him can have a taste of Puebla for lunch.  “It tastes exactly like the ones I use to have back home,” Sanchez said.

“So, who’s had eggplant before?” Lara Cely asked the five students gathered around a folding table. Cely, a healthy eating enthusiast and neighborhood resident volunteered to teach the class for the South Bronx Food Cooperative.

Cely, who trained as a chef with City Harvest, decided to teach the class because of her interest in promoting healthy eating to residents of the South Bronx, where fresh fruit and vegetables are scarce.

The South Bronx Food Cooperative hosts the cooking class across the street from its store, on Third Avenue, between East 158th and 159th streets in Melrose. Everyone from the mainly low-income community is welcome at the classes to learn how to prepare vegetables available at the co-op using easy, yet creative recipes.

The cooking class is just one of the options the co-op has started to help encourage a healthier lifestyle in a community where fast food restaurants and bodegas that sell 25-cent bags of potato chips dominate the culinary landscape.

The cooking class meets every second and fourth Wednesday each month. Students chip in a few dollars to pay for the fresh vegetables from the co-op, some of which are unfamiliar to many shoppers at the store.

“I’ve only had eggplant in eggplant parmesan,” said Melrose resident Robin Arroyo. Of the four other students in the class, Warner Perez, a New York City transit worker, also said he didn’t have much eggplant in his diet.

Perez said the class is making him “more aware of what should be consumed on a daily basis.”

According to New York City’s health department, residents in Mott Haven and Hunts Point are twice as likely to have diabetes than residents in Manhattan, and suffer more from heart disease and obesity.

“I wouldn’t want to be a statistic,” Perez said.

Marie Orilus, a social worker from Queens, shared a recipe about how she cooked eggplant in a stew with turkey and beef neck bones.

“It gives it a different taste, a different flavor,” said Orilus, as she talked about how she seasoned the neck bones with a green and red pepper, scallion, garlic and parsley puree, before steaming chopped eggplant separately and combining it with the neck bone in a tomato-based stew.

Cely sat back and listened. Once her students finished sharing recipes, she announced they would cut one eggplant into thin rounds resembling potato chips, and the other lengthwise into long, thin strips. The students took turns at cutting up the eggplants, placing them in separate baking pans lined with aluminum foil.

Orilus and Arroyo sprinkled herbs and spices onto the eggplant chips, while the others sprinkled sea salt on the strips of eggplant. Cely placed both pans in the oven for 25 minutes. While the eggplant baked, Perez chopped up mint leaves for the dish while other students cut a cucumber into tiny, pickle-sized strips.

The eggplant came out of the oven, toasted light brown, hot and ready to eat. Students grabbed at the eggplant chips. They proved soft and chewy.

Cely instructed her students to sprinkle some lemon juice onto the strips of eggplant for the other dish–—a cucumber-eggplant roll.

Arroyo was the first to try it. She sprinkled some chopped mint in the dark eggplant and rolled it in a piece of light green cucumber into a long roll that resembled a vegetarian pig-in-the-blanket.

The crisp texture of the cucumber contrasted with the soft, gooey eggplant. The mint and lemon juice provided a sweet and sour flavor. Each student tried the roll. Five heads nodded in approval.

A version of this story appeared in the Winter issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Soundslide and description by Chris Prentice

After her mother’s health struggles, Lara Cely, who teaches cooking at the South Bronx Food Cooperative, decided to learn about nutrition. She joined the co-op and, later, completed a chef-training program with City Harvest, which collects million of pounds of food from restaurants, grocers and other sources and delivers it to community food programs.

The class helps to combat the area’s diabetes epidemic, and, together with the Food Cooperative itself, to try to make what the Department of City Planning has called a “food desert” bloom with quality fruits and vegetables.

The class is just one sign of change. Mott Haven residents are growing their own produce. There’s a new wholesale farmers market in Hunts Point. And the city’s Lower Concourse plan includes a call for a new supermarket.

In the meantime, these South Bronx residents learn that eating healthy can be quick and easy, too.

A version of this story appeared in the Winter 2009 edition of the Mott Haven Herald.

By Lindsay Lazarski

lindsay.lazarski@motthavenherald.com

When people compare Mott Haven to Williamsburg or call it “SoBro” or otherwise tab it as the next up-and coming-place to live, they almost always follow by mentioning the bars where artist and yuppies congregate. There is G-Bar on the Concourse, Alexander’s Café south of the Major Deegan Expressway, and tucked below two overpasses that merge onto the Third Avenue Bridge, the pioneer of them all, the Bruckner Bar and Grill.

Part restaurant, part art gallery and part karaoke spot, the Bruckner Bar and Grill which opened 10 years ago, has become a hangout for local artists, city workers, and young professionals in business suits and heels on their lunch break and after work. 

A glass garage door that opens during the summer and a woodstove that burns in the winter keeps patrons cozy as they sit at mismatched tables on mismatched chairs and survey the latest art on the walls. With the hum of Coldplay in the background, customers order grilled salmon with mixed greens or the Mediterranean platter with eggplant salsa and Israeli salad. Dressing comes on the side.

At the bar, European soccer plays on one of the televisions and Sports Center plays on the other.  A friendly blue-eyed bartender in a t-shirt that reads “Bronx” greets each guest by yelping hello from across the restaurant as he wipes the wood counter or pulls from one of the six beers on tap. 

“If it feels like downtown, then I accomplished my mission,” says owner Alex Abeles, who plans to expand the restaurant to include an outdoor seating café during weekend brunch.

At the cost of $10 for a specialty cocktail and the “downtown-like” atmosphere, the Bruckner Bar and Grill represents change and gentrification in Mott Haven.

“It used to be a real drug-infested area,” said Christopher Garcia, who has worked at the air-conditioning company next to the Bruckner for seven years.

“You would have homeless people sleeping under the bridge and a lot of drugs and prostitution going on,” Garcia said.  Now, he says, the area has been cleaned up dramatically.   

But with a “for sale,” “for rent” or “for lease” sign affixed to the outside of nearly every building in a three-block radius, the Bruckner Bar and Grill remains a lonely outpost, in its own isolated corner, disconnected from the larger part of the community.

Its menu and its prices make add to the feeling.

The Bruckner charges $10 for a salad, while at La Familia, a Latin restaurant down the block,  $6 buys a plate piled high with homemade stewed chicken and mashed potatoes, but customers and the bar’s owner say the prices make sense.

“It’s different from what’s usually in the area,” said James Skinner, a first timer at the Bruckner who grew up in the Bronx. “This is the South Bronx: there is a lot of ethnic cuisine, Latin, Caribbean, African-American cuisine. Traditionally, you would have to go into the city to go to a bar like this.”

Abeles, who formerly managed, the Coffee Shop, a restaurant in Union Square, does not apologize for the “downtown” atmosphere or the downtown prices. 

He said he took a huge risk in 2006 by investing in a place with zero foot traffic. He needed to make many changes to attract the professional crowd from the Bronx Courthouse and Lincoln Hospital, he added.

He started with a fresh coat of paint on the walls and improved service, and added more options to the menu than just a burger.  The original owners “brought in the wrong crowd,” he said.

“We raised prices, not Manhattan high, but out of certain people’s price ranges.  We lost a lot of the crowd – troublemakers, but it was replaced by other people,” said Abeles.  

“Its nice to see that most of the tables are filled,” said William Jordan, a physician who was coming from a friend’s gallery exhibition.  But he added, “It’s hard for me to say how many of the people who are eating at these tables here actually live in the numerous housing projects that are within a few blocks of here.” 

Steven Gallegos, a regular who owns Sobro Studios, a recording and rehearsal space for bands a few doors away from the Bruckner Bar and Grill, eats at the restaurant three to four times a week. Gallegos, a New Rochelle resident, said he was first attracted to the industrial feel of the neighborhood and patronizes the Bruckner because of the family atmosphere. 

“SoHo gets a name, NoHo gets a name, why not here?” asked Gallegos. “Things have to change at some point. But I would hate to see this place turn into condos and high rises.”       

It’s Tia Singleton’s first day at the South Bronx Food Cooperative and she’s been breaking down boxes and learning how to use the cash register.

Singleton will spend three hours working at the co-op’s recently-opened store on Third Avenue. Then she’ll become a shopper, filling her grocery basket with meat, produce and household products priced from anywhere from five to 20 percent lower than in a conventional market.

The South Bronx Food Cooperative’s mission is to make nutritious food affordable by cutting out labor costs. Instead of employees, the co-op’s members, who are also its main customers, run the store. They choose the food that’s for sale, stock the shelves, man the cash register and keep the place clean, among other things.

At first glance the co-op looks like an oversized bodega, with a hand-painted mural behind the register substituted for the usual cigarettes. Though the set-up is that of a small grocery store, instead of household-name goods, the shelves are stocked with brands like “Back to Nature” or “Made in Nature,” boasting “all natural” and “organic” labels.

The store carries local, conventional and organic produce, natural household products and grass-fed and free-range meat, as well as soy-based meat alternatives.

Being part of the co-op “feels productive, like I’m doing something for the community,” said Singleton, who lives in Coop City but joined the food co-op to get the kind of groceries she would normally have to pay more for and travel further to get.

In November 2007 the co-op opened at the Nos Quedamos community center on Melrose Avenue, but was only open once a week on Saturdays. Now, in its new location, it has an actual storefront and regular hours to make it accessible to more people.

Zena Nelson, a Bronx resident and one of the main co-op’s main founders, started it for personal reasons. People in her family suffer from high blood pressure, and she knew people who died as a result of obesity.

Health organizations cite the scarcity of fresh, nutritious food in the South Bronx as one of the causes of the obesity and diabetes epidemics that its residents face. Mott Haven and Hunts Point have the highest proportion of diabetes in the New York City—double the citywide average. Twenty-five percent of adults suffer from obesity, according to the latest community health survey by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

“I understand the health issues that are involved with it,” said Nelson, “but in addition to that, as an MBA student, I understood why people couldn’t afford good food here—the prices, the markups.”

The co-op is housed in what used to be a pharmacy. For the past two months members have worked to get the new store ready to open. The old counter had to be torn out, new floors laid and renovations to the stock room area. Additionally, the walk-in refrigerator needed to be assembled and installed. There’s still more work to come, including the addition of a juice bar in the coming months.

“It’s nice to have a good place to get food in neighborhood,” said Hollie Webb, 23, who works at a bank in Manhattan and lives four blocks away. She used to drive to Westchester to go shopping, or shop at more expensive stores in the Manhattan, she said.

Now she knows she’s saving money because she uses a financial website to track her spending and can see the difference when she shops at the co-op compared to stores like Whole Foods, which also specializes in organic food.

Webb believes that one of the hardest things is getting people unfamiliar with what a co-op is to understand how it works.

Part of the reason the co-op can offer lower prices is that its members are the workers, and the more members they get, the lower prices will be, said Erin Axelrod, 21, an intern. She added that since the co-op is run by its members, they have a say in everything. If there’s something they want the store to carry, the co-op will try to get it. She thinks that’s one of the best things about a cooperative business.

Members pay a one-time fee and are required to volunteer three hours each month. There are many different ways people can put in their time in besides just working in the store. “One female doctor had a ball with a nail gun,” when a crew of cooperators installed the new floor, laughed Isaac Purdue, a co-op member who lives in Manhattan.

While volunteering is work, it’s not exactly like a regular job. In slow times members chat and joke together, and people do their grocery shopping at the end of their shifts. Webb said met a lot of great people there she was glad.

Linda Carela, who lives nearby says she used to feel that she “slept in the Bronx, but didn’t live there.”

Now, she says, she feels like part of the community. She even met people who live in her apartment building but whom she didn’t know before joining the co-op, she said.

Because it’s new, the co-op is still figuring things out. One woman who works nearby came into the store to buy juice, but left because the amateur staff couldn’t locate its price. And the co-op hasn’t yet done much community outreach. “Everything’s not going to be perfect-looking because we’re not corporate,” said Nelson.

While they strongly encourage people to join, the co-op isn’t just for members. Each price tag lists two prices, and the less is expensive one is for members. One breakfast cereal is labeled $3.99 for members and $4.99 for nonmembers, and a deluxe mac and cheese dinner is $4.09 and $4.49, for example.

Mott Haven resident Brenda Gomez, 37, shops at the co-op but hasn’t joined because she thinks it too expensive. She’s a single mom, but doesn’t qualify for public assistance, which lowers the membership fee. Nevertheless, she says she pays less for the organic milk she buys at the co-op than other places charge, and it’s the only place she’s found organic products in her neighborhood.

Now that the shakedown period is ending, Nelson hopes both membership and the co-op’s services will expand. In addition to the juice bar, plans call for cooking and nutrition classes. Yoga classes taught by co-op members are scheduled to start in the next month. They will be offered at a discount to members.

“It’s a popular myth is that people in this community don’t want this stuff, and we’re proving that wrong,” said Purdue.