Jorge Suarez has eaten many different kinds of food. He likes Middle Eastern cooking and has a fondness for Chinese. But Suarez is Colombian and says he knows what food tastes the best. “It’s mine. What I cook. Sometimes I try Cuban or Puerto Rican. I think it’s too much oil. They cook with a lot of oil and a lot of cholesterol, so I don’t like that. The flavor is no good. I try to go to something downtown like Hard Rock Cafe with my children, but I don’t really enjoy it because I don’t like food without flavor.
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Suarez is the proprietor of Churrasqueria Las Tablas, a little Colombian place near Lincoln and Wellington. Suarez prepares everything himself, from the sides of fresh chimichurri sauce made from parsley, green and white onions, and olive oil to the caramel in a signature dessert served with seasonal berries. The main courses include grilled shrimp, quickly soaked in a marinade of lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, soy sauce, salt, and pepper; churrasco, a mallet-pounded, charcoal-grilled New York strip steak smeared with a secret mix of spices and served on a wooden board with plantain, fried yuca, and a baked potato; paella, with fresh seafood, mollusks, chicken, and homemade chorizo; and any number of other combinations and preparations, each one more tender than the next. Suarez’s greatest pride, and tenderest achievement, is pollo al ajillo, a half-inch-thick chicken breast pounded flat and marinated in a spice mixture and an olive-oil-and-garlic sauce. Then there’s the fish soup. Suarez says he’ll hand grind 25 pounds of fresh fish to get the right stock, even if it takes him all day. “I make seafood soup with calamares, shrimps, clams, other fish, but it’s like a cream. No soup. It’s cream. The flavor of the seafood–it’s beautiful, it’s so beautiful.”
In 1977 the Colombian government began a charcoal-mining project on the country’s Caribbean coast. Suarez headed out, along with 50,000 other people, and became a cook for the miners. He refined his cooking and added seafood to his skills at resort hotels in Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta. After a while, he says, he would go jogging in the morning and run into American businessmen who would encourage him to open a restaurant in the U. S. For several years, starting in 1985, Suarez worked as a cook in Chicago, mostly at little Italian and Mexican joints. In 1991 he and his wife, Soraya, bought a tiny tacqueria at Irving Park and Damen and converted it into the first Las Tablas. In October 1994 the place burned down, and they lost their lease and customer base. Las Tablas reopened at its current location in a former Italian restaurant in late 1995, with a larger, better-equipped kitchen and a slightly fancier dining room.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Jorge Suarez photo by Nathan Mandell.
