La Cocina Económica has been open since 1987, which makes it older than most of Allentown’s current food scene and older than most of the people who eat there. That’s not a boast — that’s just what happens when a family feeds a neighborhood long enough that the neighborhood starts to depend on them.
Maria Figueroa — the third person in her family to run the place — doesn’t do interviews, doesn’t have a publicist, and once turned down a food magazine because she didn’t like the photographer. What she does do is come in at five-thirty in the morning on Fridays to start the pasteles. I know this because a friend of mine who lives two blocks from the restaurant on Gordon Street told me, and because when I showed up at seven-fifteen one November morning the smell of annatto and pork shoulder had already drifted halfway down the block.
The restaurant sits on the corner of Gordon and Linden in the mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood that locals just call the North Side. It’s a small dining room — eight tables, maybe, with mismatched chairs and a hand-lettered daily specials board that Maria updates herself in blue marker every morning. The menu is in Spanish, though anyone who works the counter will help you through it without making you feel like a tourist.
I go for the pasteles whenever they’re available, which is weekends and usually gone by noon. These are the real thing: masa made from grated green bananas and yautía, stuffed with slow-cooked pork seasoned with recao and sofrito, wrapped in banana leaves and boiled until the masa firms up into something dense and savory and unlike anything else. Two of them run you about nine dollars. I’ve never needed more than two.
During the week the kitchen leans into plates — pernil with rice and gandules, bacalao guisado on Fridays, and a rotating soup that changes on whatever Maria decides makes sense for the weather. The caldo gallego on cold mornings, a Galician white bean soup that reflects the family’s mixed heritage, is something I’ve thought about more than once after the fact. She serves it with crusty bread from a bakery I haven’t been able to identify. I asked once; she just said “a friend.”
The coffee is strong Puerto Rican café con leche and it costs less than two dollars. The orange juice is freshly squeezed and costs a little more. I drink both every time I go.
Lunch runs from eleven to around two or three, depending on how the day is going. It’s cash only, which the hand-lettered sign on the register will remind you of. An ATM two doors down handles that problem if you forget. Most regulars — the postal workers, the guys from the nearby construction sites, the older men who come in for coffee and nothing else — figured out the cash situation decades ago.
I’ve heard people wonder why La Cocina Económica doesn’t have more of a following outside the neighborhood. I think about Maria turning down that magazine photographer and I think maybe that’s partly by design. This isn’t a place that needs you to discover it. It’s a place that’s been feeding people who need it, quietly, for nearly four decades. If you show up and treat it accordingly, you’ll be welcome. If you show up expecting theater, you’ll eat good food and feel slightly chastened, which might also be good for you.
Go on a Friday or Saturday morning. Get the pasteles before they’re gone. Tip well. Don’t take pictures of the kitchen without asking.
