From a food standpoint, Puerto Rico represents a twisted paradox. Thanks to its balmy climate and rich soil, it has the makings of a gastronome’s Fantasy Island, a place where all sorts of natural delights sprout from the land, sometimes without much need for human coaxing. Here, Hacienda San Pedro, a coffee plantation in the mountain village of Jayuya.”
VIEQUES, P.R. — The sun was starting to recline on the horizon, but as the chef Jose Enrique slid a beaten-up Ford Explorer into a parking space here at an easygoing beachside hotel called El Blok, he admitted that his menu for this Saturday evening was still up in the air. What would he be cooking?
“I have no clue,” he said, and laughed. “We’ll see. I kind of like it that way. I think it makes me more creative.”
Mr. Enrique and Katie Savage, his chef de cuisine at the hotel, tend to wing it based on whatever baskets of fruit, bags of vegetables and buckets of seafood come their way. Dinner that night would overflow with lobster ceviche, a conch salad spooned into steaming pockets of fried bread, a dip spun from eggplants that had been smoked over the wood of wild mesquite trees, a pork chop brushed with sugar-cane juice. Toward the end would come a sweet, coral-hued sphere of guava ice.
Where did the guavas come from? Mr. Enrique motioned toward the window. The fruit tree stood right outside.
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Out on Vieques, the still-wild island that for decades has been known for bewitching peace seekers, lost souls and the United States military (which used part of it for years as a naval training range), that quest for indigenous bumper crops takes on a more haphazard form. Islanders just show up at the kitchen pass with goodies (star fruit, mango, papaya) that they plucked on a stroll into town. “We have urban foragers,” Mr. Enrique said.
Mr. Baeyertz added: “It’s not farm to table. It’s more street to table. In Vieques, it’s not seen as stealing at all. Fruit from a tree is fruit from a tree — it’s a cultural code.” Although the hotelier’s eyes did grow a tad wider one day when a gentleman appeared bearing a heap of passion fruit that looked curiously familiar.
“It was from my own garden,” Mr. Baeyertz said.
A version of this article appears in print on February 18, 2015, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Reclaiming a Food Paradise. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
