One truck. One cook.
One recipe from home.Un camión. Una cocinera. Una receta de casa.

She was made to wash dishes, peel plantains and make arepas long before she liked any of it. She admits she was terrible at first and did it because she had to. Somewhere in all that repetition she started to love it, and it never left her.

She came to the United States with a child and went to work at an Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street. She started as a waitress. One night the kitchen was short a person and the owner asked her to step in. The owner watched her handle a knife and told her she was staying.

That owner had never trained as a chef. She cooked the Neapolitan food her own grandmother had taught her, and she taught Liliana all of it. Liliana stayed for years and left as her assistant, eventually helping run the place.

The offer she turned down

They offered to set her up in her own Italian restaurant and put up everything for it. She said no. She wanted to cook Venezuelan food, and specifically maracucha food, because she knew how good it was and there was almost none of it in New York.

A restaurant cost more than she had. She noticed the trucks around the city and did the math. A truck was cheaper. That was the whole plan.

Why Inwood

She chose the neighborhood on purpose. Inwood was Dominican, and Dominicans know plantain. In 2005 most New Yorkers did not. She needed customers who would recognize what she was handing them.

She found a fritanga truck parked in a lot in that same block and asked the owner, Mr. Irán, if he knew of one for sale. He sold her his own and let her pay part up front and the rest over time. The truck was in bad shape. She rebuilt it and opened.

She also opened without permits. Five months later the city closed her down. She was operating inside a parking lot in a truck with no tires. The inspectors asked how she was working at all, then walked her through exactly what she needed to do. She did every step of it and got the permits.

What happened next

One customer told a friend. The friend brought more. She cooked in a small basement nearby until it was too small, took the Inwood storefront in 2008 and opened it in 2009, cooking for the truck and the shop at once.

When the recession hit she opened in Queens instead of pulling back. Elmhurst was mostly Asian at the time, but she had been sitting outside at dawn and noticed how many Hispanic people were around too. Her son, who had studied planning at Buffalo, checked the area and told her Asian customers love trying food they have never had. He was right. The place filled.

Patacón pisao is not what the dish is called in Venezuela. There it is just a patacón, or a patacón de carne mechada, or de pollo.

The extra word came from Johnny Ventura, the Dominican singer. He spent a lot of time in Venezuela and in Maracaibo, ate the patacón, and loved it enough to write a song about it. The song is called Patacón Pisao and almost everyone in Maracaibo and the Dominican Republic can sing it.

Her Dominican customers sang it in the shop. They sang it at four in the morning, at five, at six, until she could not hear anything else.

So when her accountant asked what name to register the business under, she already knew. Put Patacón Pisao on it, she said, because that is what everybody calls it anyway.