27-year-old Luis Sanjuan is from Barranquilla, in the north of Columbia, though his accent now has more than a hint of the Stopfordian about it. Barranquilla has the second biggest carnival in the world after Rio, and every year for four days before Lent, the city descends into chaos, with sound systems in every doorway and celebratory carnage in the streets.
“The whole city collapses,” he grins. “The King and Queen of the carnival read out a decree telling everyone to stop working, stop caring about their bosses, their companies, start drinking, staying out late. There are no buses, no taxis, no one works. It’s not a national holiday, but everyone in the city knows that no one is going to turn up for work.”
He jokes that when he ventured into Stockport for the first time 10 or so years ago, when he was studying at Stockport College, it had an air of downtown Barranquilla about it. But not necessarily the carnival side of things.
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The neighbourhood has changed some since then. With the continued success of the market and the Produce Hall opposite, not to mention the buzz around the reanimation of Little and Great Underbank, Stockport’s clearly not what it was a decade ago and next week, Luis’s first restaurant, Cafe Sanjaun, will have been open for a year.
On that first weekend that the doors opened in 2021, he threw a party and made Lechona, a whole pig, deboned and stuffed with spiced, seasoned rice, and then cooked for eight or so hours, basted throughout with sour orange. It’s usually made for festivals or at Christmas with a female pig that’s been ‘retired’. He’s making that same dish again this weekend.
At first, he says he didn’t know whether people would come, whether they’d understand the dishes that he was hoping to make - Latin American certainly, but with heavy influence from the Caribbean too, particularly with the use of plantain. This weekend, when he heaves the whole pig from the rotisserie, he says he knows for sure that it will sell out by 2pm. Many have taken Cafe Sanjuan to their hearts - Where The Light Gets In’s Michelin-tipped chef Sam Buckley among them - but then when they’re cooking whole pigs, perhaps that’s to be expected.
How he ended up in Stockport is a long story. In fact, he takes me all the way back. His great grandfather was a Basque from Galicia, who fled the Franco dictatorship and ended up in the Caribbean, where he met Luis’s great grandmother, descended from an emancipated slave from West Africa. Luis’s uncle has tried to look back into their family tree, but that branch is as clouded as you might expect.
They married and moved to Colombia, where Luis was born some decades later. The family left Colombia just before he was 18, taking up the offer to apply for Spanish citizenship in a repatriation drive by the government in 2010. Luis was part way through his national service at the time, meaning that he’s technically AWOL, so returning home is not on the cards any time soon, at least not without confronting a significant fine or worse.
They moved to Vigo in Galicia, his grandfather’s homeland, and Luis began working in ‘chiringuito’, the tiny kiosk bars which sell small, usually free tapas with drinks, so he learned how to make tasty snacks from whatever the fishermen brought in that day. It could be mussels, octopus, cockles, sometimes percebes, the alien-looking barnacles that, kilo for kilo, is some of the most expensive seafood in the world.
One day his father was in the police station - Luis is still not 100% sure why - and he met a woman from Peru who was struggling filling in forms in Galician. Of course, Latino hospitality kicked in, and she was invited back to their house for dinner, during which she explained she lived in Manchester.
Luis’s father had struggled to find work as an industrial engineer in Spain, so thought ‘fish and chips and the Queen? why not?’, and after heading to Manchester secured work almost straight away. He sent for the family in July 2012, and they all moved to Chorlton.
“It was really nice weather at the time,” says Luis. “So he tricked us.” Luis was studying engineering at Stockport but quit to carry on chef-ing. “That’s why my father lost his hair,” he jokes, but it was while he was walking through Stockport one day from college that he spotted the unit that would become his first café, and a family business too.
His mother, Viviana, works with him now too, and sometimes his younger brother Juan. She worked most of her life for the Red Cross in Colombia, with children with Down's syndrome and learning disabilities, but now brings her wealth of knowledge of Colombian food to Cafe Sanjuan.
Sadly, she was on a well-earned holiday to the Canaries when I visited last week, which meant the Con Huevo were off the menu. She is the only one who can make them. It involves deep fryers and cracking an egg into a dumpling-style corn parcel, and sounds like a one way ticket to the burns unit to me.
“The kitchen was the biggest room in the house, and my mum was always cooking, and there were always people round,” Luis says, sharing my chips. “I was always there, seeing what I could eat.”
Many of Luis’s dishes hark back to that time, not least because in Colombia, eating out is a rarity, perhaps only once a month. This is home cooking, but that’s not to say it’s simple. It isn’t.
Making the empanada pastry alone is a day’s work. He has to buy a minimum of 300 pounds of yellow or white corn that he processes himself, using a pressure cooker, then grinding it before it’s ready to use. You can buy it ready processed, but the result is not the same, plus the processed stuff is usually made with genetically modified corn, which he won’t use.
“It’s no good for the defence in your body,” he says. The toil is worth it for these results. The empanadas are fried, not baked as some are. They are light and crisp, chewy in the middle and stuffed with good things like pulled brisket or spiced beans. He sells buckets of them, but a limited number a day and when they’re gone they’re gone. Please, do not miss out, because these are truly something else.
His devotion to plantain is also just as time consuming and process heavy. To get the green, unripe plantain he needs for the patacon sandwiches - a more difficult task than you would think - he rides his bike from Stockport over to Longsight and goes shop to shop.
If they don’t turn up in Longsight, he heads over to Moss Side, and so it goes. If he’s lucky, he comes back with a backpack full of the green plantain he needs, and then the process of making them into the patacon begins, with the plantain fried until crisp and used instead of bread.
His pulled chicken is cooked in a pressure cooker, after which the meat is shredded and the bones are cooked for longer still until the gelatine is released, which then all goes back into the chicken. “It can be a dull meat,” he says. This is not, and he crams huge amounts of it into his Pollo Loco sandwich. It’s the type of sandwich that you have to eat half of before you can close it, and it comes with a piquant vinegar sauce for liberal dousing.
“We don’t do small portions,” he says. He’s not kidding. The Despacito, a huge toasted tortilla, comes stuffed with beans, halloumi and Colombian sausages made to his own recipe, and makes for a brunch which might knock out dinner.
In the space of a year, he has dozens of regulars, people coming in two or three times a week. There is one at the counter as I walk in. “I had a dream last night about that pulled chicken,” says the gangly lad at the counter, and then there’s also some animated chat about some recent lamb chops on special.
On weekends, when the place gets crammed with the Latin crowd more accustomed to weekend eating, specials include red snapper or, if you’re lucky, the fabled Lechona. Evenings see Luis collaborating with other Latin chefs, a Peruvian currently, with the menu featuring exotica like marinated cow’s heart, called anticucho, and cassava fries, alongside honest to goodness steaks and French fries.
On the huge TV at the back of the cafe, there’s a constant stream of Latin music - it’s hardcore salsa and merengue, all day long, the music that Luis grew up with. It all adds to the feeling that you’ve been plucked out of Stockport and transported elsewhere, the smell of coffee thick in the air, roasted in house from green coffee beans sent direct from Colombia. Sanjuan is a rare gem indeed, warm, welcoming and generous. Go at your very soonest convenience.
Cafe Sanjuan, 27 St Petersgate, Stockport, SK1 1EB
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