Restaurants

Cafe Dominicano

This wonderfully homey Dominican restaurant in a multicultural shopping center transcends its unremarkable ambience. A tiny cafeteria line serves hearty breakfast, lunch, and dinner dishes that call to mind a more exotic version of Southern soul food. Oxtails, pig’s feet, liver with onion, and other humble cuts of meat bob in mildly seasoned stews and soups that come with rice, beans, boiled yuca, or plantains. Even sweets like creamed beans and rice pudding seem familiar and are truly delicious.

Mornings bring awesome plates of green plantain mash (mangu) with tripleta—a fried trinity of eggs, grilled queso, and thickly sliced salami. Prices for dinner entrees hover in the lower double-digits, but the $6 lunch plates are among the city’s most enticing bargains.