Food Review: La Fritanguera

Marc Lopez “4 stars out of 5” 

Hole-in-the-wall restaurants always seem to be the best places to eat. La Fritanguera hits close to home being a Nicaraguan cuisine restaurant and with its stellar food. Being nicaraguense, seeing familiar delicacies such as chancho frito, gallo pinto, tajadas, maduros and queso frito made me feel like grandma was hard at work cooking a feast for my family.

My main course was one of my favorite dishes, ‘carne desmenuzada.’ This humongous plate slightly disappointed me in its taste. There is a distinct sour after taste from the tomato sauce used in the plate and was kinda hard to get over it.

Nevertheless, La Fritanguera deserves so much more business than it gets. This restaurant may not be able to beat grandma’s cooking but it’s worth the big bucks.

A.R. Broom “4 stars out of 5” 

With an eating area a little larger than the rooms most of us sleep in, Concord’s La Fritanguera is a hole-in-the-wall to say the least. Serving up authentic Nicaraguan food is its specialty, but it comes at a heftier price than one might expect. A drink, a shared sampler platter, and shared dessert will get you out the door below $30 and very well fed. Service is kind and accommodating, even generous enough to replace a drink clumsily knocked over by yours truly.

As far as the food goes, well, it’s in the name. Much of the food was fried, and if you are not afraid of starchier foods like yucca and plantains, you’ll love it.

Plantain was served three ways on the platter, and yucca in a salad. Cheese was cut into cubes and fried, as were some bits of pork, both delicious. Meat of other animals was wonderfully marinated and strewn out about the platter, along with some rice and whole beans. Dessert was a thick crepe, rolled up with sugar, butter and spice.

It was all very nice, but seemed a little too pricey for what felt like a home cooked meal. That said, I’ll be going back for those amazing little crispy morsels of fried pork.

Lilly Montero “4 stars out of 5” 

La Fritanguera was my first experience with Nicaraguan food and after that I just need more. We ordered El Nica “The Ultimate Nicaraguan Sampler” and it was ridiculously good. The platter was large, promised to serve two to three people, and delivered. It included chancho frito, carne, chicken, taquitos, gallo pinto, tostones, tajadas and maduros, queso frito and vigoron.

Admittedly, there was a lot of the food I wasn’t familiar with and so there were some parts of the dish I wasn’t that into, but think that I would be if I had a bit more exposure to it. The tostones, which are twice fried plantains, and vigoron, which included boiled yucca, I felt were kind of tasteless. As I said before though, I’ve had no exposure to Nicaraguan food so I’m not sure I appreciated it to its fullest.

Other than that the plate was a big dish of deliciousness. I was especially surprised with the chancho frito which I was expecting to be bland but was a fried heaven. My favorite part of the dish were the taquitos. Again, another small delight. Definitely looking forward to exploring more Nicaraguan food.