Red snapper and smoked coconut rice in Stockport
Let me tell you about a little Colombian place I know.
My favourite places to eat are often ones with very short menus. The shorter, the better. I like a chef that specialises in something rather than trying to please everyone. So the one-item Saturday menu at Cafe San Juan in Stockport works perfectly for me.
Every Saturday, this small Colombian cafe on Stockport’s Petersgate offers a different lunch special. This is a real ‘if you know, you know’ place. You have to pre-book via Instagram DMs and they sell out very quickly because the people that do know about it, can’t get enough. One week the lunch special might be tamales, the next, lechona (stuffed piglet), but a big favourite is deep-fried red snapper and that’s what I went back for on Saturday.
I first met Luis Felipe San Juan when I was tipped off about his cafe by Where The Light Gets In chef-owner Sam Buckley on a visit to Stockport. At the time, I was Editor of Confidentials, and I was taking my team all over Greater Manchester every other week to encourage exploration and real, first-hand knowledge of what’s going on in our region, not just in Ancoats and The Northern Quarter. We split up and went to a few different places for breakfast, and Cafe San Juan was hands down the favourite. Luis was warm and friendly and told us his very interesting life story.
The breakfasts here are incredible in themselves. Despacito, which means slowly, is a Sydney Opera House shaped tortilla bowl filled with a blend of melted cheeses and beans and topped with sausages or plantain or halloumi. San Juan is free-range scrambled eggs (from Buxton) with Colombian sausages on a toasted bagel. Colombians call these eggs ‘perico’ and it also happens to mean a small bag of cocaine or a milky coffee. A full Colombian breakfast comes with arepas and fresh guacamole. Luis and his folks make their own sauces in the tiny kitchen: chilli churry is somewhere between sweet chilli sauce and chimichurri, ajonice is a garlicky mayo flecked with capers, a pineapple mayo is served with pulled chicken.
Lunch is massive stuffed brioches, empanadas, or, my favourite, the papa. A craggy, golden ball of battered and deep-fried potato stuffed with slow-cooked brisket. We order one to share as a totally unnecessary starter alongside a couple of crumpet-textured pan de queso balls. Our papa comes with a new salsa Luis has knocked up made from jalapeño chillies and sour green Austrian wine grapes that he has been growing in his back yard. This year, they are flourishing, he tells me. Will Stockport be the UK’s newest wine appellation in a few years?
Speaking of wine, Luis doesn’t have a license for people to drink alcohol at Cafe San Juan yet but he is working on making the adjustments needed to get one. Then he will be able to host more supper clubs like the Colombian steak nights he trialled a while back. Refreshments today come from Stockport market’s Wine Boy in the form of a cold glass of skin-contact non-alcoholic grape juice.
But all this is peripheral to the main event. Here comes the red snapper. I can’t think of many better value lunches for £17 in the whole of Greater Manchester. Luis deep fries these huge snappers, their white flesh firm and juicy, and serves them with smoked coconut rice - perhaps the most delicious rice I have ever eaten. He happily reels off his mum Viviana’s recipe which involves taking a fresh coconut, blitzing its flesh and juice and cooking it in a frying pan on a high heat with a splash of molasses to caramelise it. The rice is then added, along with some water, to infuse it with all those incredible flavours.
On the side, there is a fresh mango and chilli salsa with rocket, fried green plantain, (patacon) and a little ramekin of sauce Luis makes from fish head stock reduction with roe, coriander and lime and whatever seafood he has knocking around. Today, it’s prawns. Get this for your lunch and you won’t need to eat for the rest of the day. In more than five years of eating and writing about it for a living, this is still one of my favourite meals in Manchester.
Luis is about to celebrate two years of Cafe San Juan. He sits down for a chat as we loll back in our chairs after our lunch. His kid brother runs around waiting tables in the background.
“My first job was as a butcher,” he tells us, “I started I was about 12. The guy I worked for lost his eyesight from cataracts and could still break a cow into 32 pieces in the dark. He had me help him with the more precision stuff.”
The last time we spoke, Luis told me that he couldn’t go back to Colombia as he might be forced to join the army. “My friends [who have been in the army] are still traumatised by it,” he says, “They feel like people are following them all the time. I’m scared to go back but I would love to visit for Carnival one more time.”
Luis moved to Spain when his dad, a Spanish national, was made redundant in Colombia. His dad struggled to find work there due to the well-documented employment crisis and he got a job in the UK. Luis learned English and began studying mechanical engineering. He got a job as a KP at Syrian restaurant Damas: The Art of Meze in Chorlton (now long gone) while he was studying. Soon enough, he began spending more attention on cooking than mechanical engineering - much to his dad’s disappointment. He worked in various places around Manchester including Shoku in MediaCity and California Coffee and Wine in Altrincham before deciding that he wanted to open his own place to cook his home comfort food.
Luis and his family are “Costeños” from Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. That Caribbean influence lights up the plate. As far as I know, this is the only place in Greater Manchester that does Colombian food. It’s completely unique, incredible value for money, and run by a lovely guy obsessed with sharing his wonderful food with you. Yes, Stockport is booming right now, and there are lots of reasons to visit, but the reason I go back, again and again, is Cafe San Juan.
I have spoken to people at Plastic Shed that raved about Cafe San Juan, we actually tried to go there one afternoon but they'd sold out by the time we got there. I would very much like to try the snapper sometime 🤗