A Legendary Puerto Rican Chef Reemerges in Oakland — After 5 Years Behind Bars

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lash back to 2015, when the hottest restaurant in Oakland’s Dimond District wasn’t a trendy Asian fusion spot, or a Michelin-endorsed palace of fine dining, or a temple to California cuisine. It wasn’t even a proper restaurant, really. Instead, crowds of hungry people would line up inside the Two Star Market liquor store on MacArthur for a taste of slow-roasted pernil, grilled chicken thighs with garlic and caramelized onions, and fragrant, annatto-stained arroz con gandules.

The liquor store takeout spot was called Borinquen Soul, and it specialized in what founders Eric “E” Rivera and Chris Caraballo liked to call “food for the homesick boricua.” At the time, it was the only Puerto Rican restaurant in the East Bay, and even though the place didn’t really have any seating to speak of, it routinely drew customers from as far away as Stockton and San Jose.

Then it just kind of disappeared. When Borinquen Soul closed in 2017, the two owners went their separate ways, and Rivera opened a new restaurant, W.E.P.A.!, that lasted less than a year. After that, nothing. Seven years passed without any word from the business. No explanation was ever given for why it had closed.

Until a couple of months ago, that is. That was when Rivera, aka Chef E, suddenly reemerged at a little pop-up takeout window in Vallejo, where for a short time he was selling the same food I remembered from all those years ago — the same yellow rice flecked with pigeon peas and pimento olives, the ultra-crisp tostones and tangy mayuketchu. And if all goes according to plan, next month Rivera will complete his comeback. He’s opening a new restaurant in East Oakland’s San Antonio neighborhood called Puerto Rican Street Cuisine that’ll serve all of the old favorites from Borinquen Soul. It will once again be the only full-fledged Puerto Rican restaurant in Oakland.

“This place is going to be an incredible spot in these next few months, where you can just get the best of the best food,” he says.

And as it turns out, there was a good reason why Rivera put his business on pause for seven years: He spent most of that time in jail, awaiting trial for a crime he says he didn’t commit.

A Life-Changing Turn of Events

Born and bred in the Bronx, Rivera moved to the Bay Area to live with his aunt when he was a teenager, graduating from Independence High School in San Jose in the early ’90s. Back then, he was an up-and-coming rapper, performing under the name Mookie D. He was a member of the San Jose rap crew Red Black & Green, which put out an EP produced by KutMasta Kurt. He was good friends with Sway Calloway, too, in those early years before Sway became one of the hip-hop world’s most prominent interviewers and tastemakers — Rivera even wound up rapping on one of the first episodes of Sway’s Wake Up Show on KMEL.

After high school, Rivera moved back to New York before returning to the Bay for good in 2008, dabbling in different jobs before he got serious about cooking. He was an amateur MMA fighter for a time and then worked as a strength and conditioning coach for the Oakland Raiders. In 2012, he and fellow Bronx transplant Chris Caraballo officially launched Borinquen Soul, initially as a food truck — the very first Puerto Rican food truck in the Bay Area.

Back then, Rivera recalls, it was just about impossible to find proper Puerto Rican food in the Bay: “When we came from New York, we got homesick right away. The food here wasn’t hitting home.” He and Caraballo started pulling up to Bay Area nightclubs, blasting loud salsa music from the truck when the clubs were letting out for the night.

“It just became an overnight hit,” Rivera says. “People were hitting us up like, ‘Bro, I don’t know how to pronounce your name, but man, that was the best food I ever had!’ It was just the best feeling in the world.”

The truck quickly built up a large fan base, which stayed loyal through the business’ remarkable three-year run inside the Two Star Market liquor store, from 2015 to 2017.

In many ways, then, the summer of 2018 was the high point of Rivera’s cooking career. Even though he’d closed Borinquen Soul after parting ways with Caraballo, his new restaurant, W.E.P.A.! (Where Everybody Parties At), was already making a name for itself with its menu of homey Puerto Rican dishes served inside a Jack London nightclub. Then came the ultimate validation: In June of that year, W.E.P.A.! got the Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives treatment, as the Bleached One himself gave Rivera’s loaded plantains and chicken chicharron mofongo the Flavortown stamp of approval. For a small, relatively unknown restaurant like Rivera’s, that kind of national TV exposure had the potential to be life-changing. “It was like a dream come true, man,” Rivera recalls.

Just a month later, that dream turned into a nightmare. Rivera says he was getting ready to open the restaurant on a Thursday afternoon when police officers showed up — without a warrant, he says — and grabbed him in the doorway. Rivera was arrested on a robbery charge and wound up serving five and a half years behind bars for a crime he insists he didn’t commit. He says there was even video evidence that proved he was at his restaurant the night the robbery took place.

Rivera eventually signed a plea deal, though, after he’d already been held in Dublin’s notoriously dangerous Santa Rita Jail for four years without a trial. He says Alameda County prosecutors kept finding reasons to postpone the trial — a sign, he believes, that they knew they didn’t have a case. Still, the long years and awful conditions in jail had worn him down. Rivera’s mother passed away while he was at Santa Rita. And like many of the inmates there, he spent most of his time in “23 and 1” solitary confinement, trapped inside his own thoughts, allowed outside his cell for only one hour a day. Rivera says prosecutors led him to believe that if he signed the plea agreement, he would be set free right away on time served. Instead, he wound up spending another year and a half in prison.

The whole ordeal turned Rivera into something of an activist. Toward the end of his time at Santa Rita, he participated in a hunger strike to protest the inedible, often rat-feces-infested food there (now the subject of a class action lawsuit that he’s joined). He’s also preparing to file civil lawsuits against both OPD and the California Parole Board.

At the same time, Rivera believes his time in prison ultimately helped him to become a better, stronger person. He’d once turned a bit of common Puerto Rican slang — “wepa,” meaning “cool” or “all right!” — into a restaurant concept. One day, while he was in solitary lockdown, a new acronym appeared to him in a vision. Instead of lamenting, “why me,” Rivera spun those letters into a more positive mindset: “Whatever Happens, You Must Embrace.”

“I focused on how do I make myself better,” he says. “That’s essentially what happened.”

And, as it turns out, he was able to start cooking again. Rivera says he was put in jail so soon after his feature on Diners, Drive-ins & Dives that the episode was still airing regularly. When he was transferred to the state prison in Jamestown, a prison officer who had seen the show recognized him and said, “Man, I know you! What are you doing here?” The prison officer wound up recruiting Rivera to cook in the Jamestown prison kitchen, which he agreed to do — feeding 3,000 inmates at a time — as long as they let him make Puerto Rican food. Eventually, he was transferred over to become the head chef at the Ben Lomond fire camp, in the Santa Cruz mountains, where he was tasked with cooking for the incarcerated firefighters assigned to battle the region’s ongoing wildfires.

“I was cooking yellow rice. I was cooking carne guisa. We were doing habichuelas guisa,” Rivera says, laughing. “We were giving them the best food they ever had.”

An Improbable Comeback

Since getting out of prison in December of 2023, Rivera says he’s been slowly working his way back into the Bay Area food scene, doing a handful of pop-ups and festivals and picking up catering jobs here and there. The whole time he’s been struck by just how many customers he’s run into who still have fond memories of Borinquen Soul — of snagging a piece of crispy pork skin from the Two Star Market location’s weekend pernil or, even earlier, buying chicken-and-rice plates off the food truck.

For a tiny liquor store food operation that was only open for three years, Borinquen Soul had an outsized impact on the local food ecosystem. In fact, almost every notable Puerto Rican restaurant or food truck that’s opened in the Bay Area in the past decade has ties to that tiny convenience store kitchen. Anthony Lamboy of Boriqua Kitchen, the Bay Area’s only active Puerto Rican food truck, did a stint at Borinquen Soul before branching out to open his own business. Cheo Ortiz, the chef-owner of La Perla, also started out as a cook there before taking over the Two Star Market’s kitchen once Borinquen Soul closed. He eventually expanded La Perla into a full-fledged Puerto Rican restaurant — Oakland’s only one until it relocated to Castro Valley earlier this year. And Lourdes Marquez-Nau, aka Chef Lulu, of vegan Puerto Rican spot Casa Borinqueña, used to work the festival circuit with Rivera during that earlier food truck iteration of Borinquen Soul.

Call it the Greg Popovich coaching tree of Puerto Rican chefs in the Bay. As Rivera puts it, “Borinquen Soul was a big springboard for a lot of people to do really, really well.”

Rivera says he’s still close with all of those chefs. Just last week, Lamboy came over to the new spot to help him raise a Puerto Rican flag up on the roof. Meanwhile, Marquez-Nau, who just opened a second location of her restaurant in Philadelphia, recalls that she first got to know Rivera mostly as a customer — she, too, was a homesick New York boriqua who was craving real Puerto Rican food. She wound up helping out with the food truck, and when she decided to open her own business, Rivera came and showed her staff how to make the dough for alpacurrias (stuffed plantain fritters).

“He’s like a brother,” Marquez-Nau says. “I will support Eric any way I can.”

Rivera’s hope, of course, is that Puerto Rican Street Cuisine will be a similarly impactful restaurant — both for the local East Oakland community as well as the Bay Area’s wider Puerto Rican diaspora. To start, the restaurant will function just as a simple takeout window. He’ll sell all of the big Puerto Rican staples he used to serve at Borinquen Soul: pernil, chicken encebollado, carne guisa, arroz con gandules, empanadas, pasteles, alpacurrias, and both sweet and savory plantains. He’ll serve his signature dishes that Diners, Drive-ins & Dives made famous, too — the canoa (loaded plantains) and the fried-chicken mofongo.

In a couple of months, he hopes to open for dine-in customers as well. There’s also a whole outdoor area in the back that he says is like a “hidden oasis,” where he eventually hopes to host private events, putting to use his custom slow cooker that can roast four pigs at once. And who knows? Eventually he’d like to expand to other locations as well, using his East Oakland flagship as a central hub to train his staff, just as he once taught other inmates to cook when he was the head chef in prison.

In some ways, Rivera’s journey to opening this new restaurant seems incredibly improbable after all these years. But he has lived and persevered through so many different lives already — a son of the Bronx, a rapper, a fighter, a coach, a chef, an entrepreneur, a prison activist, and now a chef once again. Who’s to say he’s done reinventing himself?

Puerto Rican Street Cuisine will likely have its soft opening around the second week of July at 1430 23rd Ave. in Oakland. To start out, the restaurant will be open for takeout only.