Gary Wong Gary Wong

San Juan, May 1-5, 2025

You’ll never guess why I ended up in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a long weekend. If you think it has to do with, yet again, airline credit/perks, you would be absolutely right. I had a Delta Companion Certificate, good up to Domestic First Class (basically anywhere Delta flies where First Class is the highest available so not quite domestic) and I had never been to Puerto Rico before so, why not?

#prtrip25

You’ll never guess why I ended up in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a long weekend. If you think it has to do with, yet again, airline credit/perks, you would be absolutely right. I had a Delta Companion Certificate, good up to Domestic First Class (basically anywhere Delta flies where First Class is the highest available so not quite domestic) and I had never been to Puerto Rico before so, why not? All in, for the two of us, was just a shade over $900 for a round trip in FC. It was absolutely worth it, even if it meant sitting in their suuuuuper firm seats on an A321neo. I’ve shared my thoughts on that hard product before so I won’t go into it here but I will say that even the soft product suffered here with the meal service missing elements like bread or salad - thankfully, these were short flights so we weren’t exactly going hungry for long.

The Food and Drinks

My time in San Juan was short so I don’t think I can really offer up a take on the food scene there. Outside of dinner each night, food mostly happened at bars and bakeries. As per usual, I had ramen because, for science, and while Kaiju Noodle Bar was decent enough, I don’t feel as though I ever need to go there again. The highlight outside of dinner would be La Taberna Lúpulo which was just an incredible craft beer bar in Old San Juan with plenty of taps and sausage for snacks - basically, my happy place. Another honourable mention goes to La Parroquia for their really tasty cocktails with freshly prepared ingredients and mixers.

Dinner each of the three nights was a nice sit-down affair. Of the three, there’s an obvious winner among them but Cocina al Fondo was a solid second place - their octopus dish might have been the most tender serving of cephalopod I’ve ever had. Interesting space too as the primary indoor space had a bunch of tables and the bar but the majority of the seating looked to be in their incredibly spacious (partially covered) backyard, along with their kitchen.

The aforementioned winner amongst the three restaurants was Marmalade. It’s a five-course menu for $145 and their second course is an incredible white bean with black truffle soup that has apparently been on the menu forever - deservedly so. The menu is a little over the place but in a good way as there’s pretty much something to satisfy anyone’s taste. Bonus, the chef is seemingly a fan of The National as they played two tracks of theirs during my two hours there and I don’t think there were any other repeat artists.

I Nature’d

Like in San Francisco in January, there was a National Park Service site in San Juan - several, in fact! However, while Castillo San Felipe del Morro and Castillo San Cristóbal are listed as such, those aren’t sites you’d consider to be nature-y. What actually was that was El Yunque National Forest, a part of the Forest Service and the only federal forest that’s a tropical rainforest. That last bit kinda surprised me as I figured Hawaii or even Guam might have one but, nope, Puerto Rico is it!

As it was with Yosemite, this nature-ing was via guided tour so it limited us to what we could see and do. While we saw a decent amount of the park, it was either mostly in the vehicle or around the visitor center. That’s fine but without being able to roam around and hike along the trail, it really felt like a very curated (which it was) experience.

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