AT 10:30 ON A SULTRY SUMMER morning in New York City, Douglas Rodriguez is striding purposefully through the Union Square farmers' market and pushing a stroller laden with much more than his 21-month-old son, Leandro. In plastic bags slung over the handlebars, Rodriguez has six pounds of plump sugar snap peas, a dozen fronds of unbudded garlic and a great green mass of radish sprouts, which at the moment are inspiring paeans to the god of garnishes. "It comes from the daikon radish!" Rodriguez says, pulling out a few sprigs and holding them up in the sunshine. "It is really spicy and terrific!" His wife, Patricia, smiles and segues into the stroller-steering duties while he scouts more vegetables. Their son, she says, beaming down at Leandro, is really starting to talk: "He says, 'Papa,' 'Mama,' 'Tino'—he's our Welsh corgi—and 'comida.' "
That Leandro should already know the Spanish word for food is hardly surprising. His mother is the publicist for Patria, one of the hottest and most cutting-edge restaurants in New York City. Leandro's father is Patria's executive chef and part owner, the winner of the 1996 James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year award, one of Newsweek's 100 Americans for the Next Century and a man bold enough to have prepared seviche—a marinated seafood dish—on The Late Show with David Letterman. Julia Child celebrated her 80th birthday at his tables; Alice Waters, the mother of California cuisine, has sung his praises; and to Nina Zagat, of the Zagat restaurant survey, he is simply "the most important Latin chef in the restaurant world."
At 31, Rodriguez has established himself as the mambo king of a new cuisine known as pan-Latin or Nuevo Latino—which is also the title of his first cookbook, published by Ten Speed Press. Rodriguez's cooking is distinguished partly by his use of exotic ingredients. "Right now I am excited about ojo santa," he says, back at his restaurant. "They are sarsaparilla leaves—that plant that root beer comes from. I found a farmer in Florida who will supply them, and tonight we are using them to wrap white corn tamales." But what really sets Rodriguez apart is his use of high-toned French, Japanese and American cooking techniques to heighten and transform what are essentially Latin American peasant dishes.
The menu at Patria includes such items as a Puerto Rican clam tamale with tomato, avocado, spicy pepper and crispy rock shrimp; Guatemalan Chicken in mole sauce with green rice, avocado and plantain chips; and Paraguayan Smoked Rib Eye with watercress, mushroom vinaigrette and corn pudding. Some ingredients he finds on food safaris through Latin America and the Caribbean—but the ideas for combining them, he says, "come from my dreams—I keep a pad and pencil on my night table."
Rodriguez waxes passionate when he talks about cooking. "I like to layer flavors and play with different textures," he says, "to mix something tart with something velvety or buttery, something sweet with something salty, something smooth and something crispy. It is like yin and yang. I'm a student of Latin culture and food, and I enjoy educating other people."
Actor Andy Garcia, a native of Cuba, is a frequent Patria patron. "I can appreciate how nouvelle meets Caribbean, how oysters Rockefeller meet the Cuban plantain in his kitchen," says Garcia. "It is a hybrid of European classical cooking and folkloric foods, so artistic—really, it is the kind of breakthrough that Picasso accomplished with Cubism."
The food, though, is mostly great fun. As the customers at Patria wait for a table in the cavernous, Art-Deco-meets-El Greco space on Park Avenue South and 20th Street—sometimes for an hour or more—they tap their toes to Latin music of the '50s and '60s. Sometimes celebrities drop by, but even when such recent diners as Garcia, George Clooney, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Dolly Parton and Gloria Estefan are not available for ogling, the food puts on a floor show: huge plantain chips bristle from bright red salsa; a liqueur-soaked cake arrives topped with a white-chocolate shooting star and crescent moon. One evening last month, a large party of patrons, inspired by the cuisine, the music and perhaps the mostly fruity-tasting wines and festive blender drinks, suddenly stood up and started sambaing. Garcia says he understands the reaction. "This food," the actor says, "is becoming a craze."
Walking briskly through Patria's kitchen at 3:15 p.m., Rodriguez high-fives his cooks, shakes hands with prep workers, dips his finger in a Peruvian seviche sauce and tastes it, then swipes a cookie from a sheet fresh out of the oven. "Order another 30 pounds of salmon," he shouts to a man carrying a wooden crate.
With the dinner shift approaching, Rodriguez grills the wait staff on the specials. "Tell me, what have we got tonight?" he challenges one waiter, who is knotting his fruit-motif tie.
"We have the sweetwater baby lobsters from Ecuador, poached with rock shrimp and bay scallops and served in a seviche marinade with mint, basil, jalapeño and cilantro, garnished with scallion and cucumber, topped with a crispy fried sesame calamari that has been marinated in soy sauce and ginger," the waiter reports.
"And what are these baby lobsters?" Rodriguez asks. Then, answering his own question, he says, "Larger than a crawfish and the meat is denser." The waiters all taste the appetizer, as they do every dish. "Ay Dios," one says. "Now that has a kick."
Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the vast sea of his extended Cuban-American family, Rodriguez became intrigued with food at an early age. "I remember on Saturday mornings all the kids wanted to watch cartoons," he recalls. "I wanted to watch the channel where Julia [Child] was cooking." His mother, Gloria, a bank manager, cooked Cuban style. "There was never a night without rice and beans," Rodriguez says. His father, Francisco, a barber, often prepared rich, beefy stews that he had learned about from his own mother.
Rodriguez's third cousin Johnny Hernandez, a bartender at Patria, remembers the moment he realized Douglas was serious about food. "In 1977 there was a blackout in the city," Hernandez says. "Our family was at Doug's house, and like good Cubans they threw a party. Finally all the food was gone, and everything in the refrigerator had gone bad from the heat. Doug got some bread and spread peanut butter on it. Then he took green grapes, cut them in halves and put them on the sandwiches. I remember then my brother Archie said, 'You should be a chef, Doug.' It was really a premonition; his combinations of foods today are just as unorthodox."
When Rodriguez was in high school, his family, tired of the Manhattan winters, moved to Miami. "I took a job at Luigi's Italian Restaurant," he says. "I imitated chefs I'd seen, wrapping the garlic cloves in a cloth and banging them with a pan that would pop them right out of their skins. The chef made me his prep assistant, saying I was the fastest garlic peeler he ever met." In 1985, Rodriguez attended the cooking program at Johnson & Wales University in Providence for a semester but ran out of money and had to quit. "I think that made him even hungrier for success," remembers Andrew DiCataldo, 32, a longtime friend and now his second in command. "He got the 'I'll show you' attitude."
Rodriguez returned to Miami, found backers and opened Yuca, in Coral Gables, in 1989 at the age of 23. The place started with 79 seats but within a year grew to 220. "Everyone who went to Yuca said it was the beginning of a new wave of Latin food," says Nina Zagat. For Rodriguez it was also the start of a new life. In 1991, Patricia, now 37, a Pittsburgh native who had worked as a stockbroker but wanted to pursue a career in the restaurant business, came in to apply for a job as a hostess. "I saw her sitting at the bar, and she had this long, elegant neck," says Rodriguez. "It was love at first sight." She got the job, and a year later they were married.
In 1994, TV-commercial producers Phil Suarez and Bob Giraldi made Rodriguez an offer to back a restaurant in New York City. "We thought we'd be little fish in a big bowl," Trish remembers, "but we figured no risk, no gain." It didn't help that the food critics' expectations were high, based on the buzz surrounding Yuca. Still, in its first year, the restaurant won two (out of four) stars from New York Times critic Ruth Reichl. In September 1996 she raised Patria to three-star status (there are only five four-star restaurants in New York City), declaring that "each dish explodes in the mouth with a rich variety of tastes." Rodriguez has received similar kudos in Gourmet, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine and The New Yorker, which said the cuisine was "fabulous and much more fun than the average food."
For Rodriguez the joy of cooking starts long before the fajitas hit the fire. Twice a year he and his wife go on eating excursions, scouring Latin America from Mexico to Cape Horn. They tramp though village marketplaces, trek mountain paths and chow down at street stands in search of new ingredients. Their recent passions include huitlacoches (pronounced wee-la coach-ess)—delicate mushrooms that grow on corn husks in the rainy season; maté, an herbal tea drunk from a gourd in Argentina and Paraguay; and culantro, a mild variation of the herb cilantro, which they came upon in Ecuador, where Rodriguez says they also ate a "delicious guinea pig."
These days, Rodriguez is on the road almost as much as off. In May he opened a restaurant called Aquarela in the El San Juan hotel in San Juan, and he and his family travel there frequently from their home in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. In January his next cookbook, a collection of soup and stew recipes called Latin Ladles will be published. And now he is thinking about a national chain that would serve a scaled-down, less pricey version of Nuevo Latino. "Someday my dream is to transport this food from Park Avenue to places like Columbus, Ohio," he says. An intriguing notion, to be sure—but it's probably best to hold the guinea pig.
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