Stephanie Bonin is a Barranquilla, Colombia born chef and the owner of Patio Tropical in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For years, Stephanie has been doing to legwork in Colombia. While she did work at Cosme in New York for a little while, most of her experience comes from learning not in fancy restaurant kitchens in cities, but from traditional cooks, many of them older women, in the provinces of Colombia and elsewhere in Latin Aemrica. She is well versed in Latin America’s regional foods and is behind the brand La TropiKitchen, which has been doing pop ups and catering events in the New York area since the pandemic. When I first spoke to her in one of the earliest episodes of this podcast, she was in the Catskills cooking for the summer.
Patio Tropical is in the back of the This is Latin America store, which sells handicrafts and home goods from artisans from around Latin America. It’s on one of the last remaining Latin American streets in Williamsburg, a neighborhood that has gone through a dramatic transformation and gentrification. The street still has this gritty Latin Caribbean vibe and what I especially like about Patio Tropical is that Stephanie embraces that. She isn’t trying to appeal to just the hipsters and tourists there, but to the people that have lived on the street for decades. If you sit there in that leafy back dining room that’s full of life and color, the neighbors come and go. They all already know Stephanie and hug her and dance with her while ordering arepas and pandebono. It’s one of the few New York restaurants where hyper-regional recipes from places like Puerto Rico or the La Guajira province of Colombia don’t feel pretentious. She uses good ingredients and plates them nicely, but she isn’t trying to make them into something they are not. They just are, and they’re delicious.
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