![]() ![]() If needed, she’d be a good person to pass the torch to eventually. I’m not afraid, Yo pa’lante.”Īt 6 p.m., Romero closed the kitchen and headed home, while her friend and colleague Marisol, a middle-aged woman wearing her long blond hair under a baseball cap, took over for the next shift. Still, she keeps coming to work despite protests from family and friends. Right now, she is fighting her second bout with cancer. Her message is simple: “In life, there are lots of obstacles, but you have to stay positive.” Romero has seen her share. Understanding how hard it is to make a new life in a new country, she has mentored several teenage regulars. “They let go of the monotony of the same old routine: work to home, home to work.” She adds “Anyone who comes here eats, with or without money.”ĭishes from Tony’s Billiard Cafe in the Bronx include a salad, wings, and fried pork belly in a red bean liquor served over white rice. “People come warm up, talk to each other, play pool, dominoes, or watch TV.,” she says. ![]() The food she cooks at Tony’s, however, isn’t based on her classes at Universidad APEC and Infotep in Santo Domingo here, she uses the techniques she began honing as a kid, after her grandmother became too ill to care for her. ”Īs soon as she moved to an apartment in the Bronx upstairs from Tony’s, she took over the lunch counter and her food was drawing long lines, this time in the States. ![]() “The oven would go out suddenly, and I’d have to finish work using a wood pallet. “ we’d bring a gas tank to have it filled up and later realize they didn’t give us the amount we paid for,” she says. She had an award-winning pastry shop in Santo Domingo, but she found operating a business frustrating. Romero moved from Santo Domingo to the Bronx 16 years ago, when she was 47. People live in these buildings for 30 years and don’t know their neighbors or even say hello to them in the hallway.” “In the Dominican Republic, you don’t need a place like this, people interact outside,” she says, “Life is different here. For neighborhood residents, it is a communal living room. The convivial atmosphere keeps them lingering well after lunch. The billiard room at Tony’s Billiard Cafe.Īll day people trot down the basement stairs into the tiny space, for Romero’s food. She smiled, walked back to the kitchen, and assuredly spooned stewed meat and beans into containers. You can count on it.” Anita overheard him. He moved to New Jersey years ago, but he still makes a long trip once a week, because, as he says, ”Anita’s sazon is always the same. A bundled-up man hustled down the entryway stairs for his takeout order. People who eat here once become customers for life. Fried pork belly chunks taste great over white rice soaked in red bean liquor. ![]() Her stewed beef, goat, and chicken are tender and aromatic, bathed in tangy sofrito. The food is delicious at Tony’s (the name has stuck despite the fact that Romero and customers don’t know who Tony was. At separate high-top tables along the walls, two men sat quietly, enjoying the main attraction, chef Anita Belen Romero’s daily specials. A small child ran between the three bar-sized pool tables to the TV in the back to watch cartoons in Spanish. On a cold Saturday afternoon at Tony’s Billiard Cafe in the Bronx, a family of three sat at the black granite lunch counter drinking multicolored Country Club sodas. ![]()
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