Yelitza Rivera made at least one easy adjustment after she left Maracaibo, Venezuela, almost 20 years ago. It was thejibarito, the mojo-slicked pressed plantain sandwich invented in Humboldt Park by Juan C. Figueroa at the late great Borinquen Restaurant. See, her hometown in northwest Venezuela is the birthplace of the patacón Maracucho, a sandwich of strikingly similar construction, best eaten when the starchy green bananas are still hot and crispy from the fryer, and you’re in the right frame of mind and physical circumstances to negotiate the unstable strata within.
“You have to get dirty,” says Jesus Arrieta, Rivera’s son, who enlisted with his mother four years ago when she opened Jibaritos y Mas at the corner of Fullerton and Kimball, the footprint of a nascent jibarito empire. “You gotta hold it with your two hands and don’t be scared of it. You have to attack it.”
It’s almost as if Rivera somehow absorbed the lifeforce of a Boricua granny in the 14 years she worked down the street at Ponce, saving up to strike out on her own.
