January 14, 2022 – Open less than two months, Fuego Fresh Latin Food is the Croatian capital's latest international food offer. TCN visited to check out their authentic South American and Caribbean Latin cuisine.

Slightly hidden at the foot of a residential building on the edge of Lower Town, immediately behind Zagreb Holding, the capital's latest international food offer is definitely worth finding. Fuego Fresh Latin Food serves rustic and affordable dishes of Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba. Think homemade tortilla chips, corn, salads, spices, lime juice, salsa and chilli sauce. Its authentic menu is the creation of American-Croatian Richard Gruica, a chef with 20 years experience making Latin cuisine. Total Croatia News went to meet him and get the story behind his Fuego Fresh Latin Food.

Fuego Fresh Latin Food's Richard Gruica-Plešivica © Marc Rowlands

My name is Richard Gruica. I was born in Jamaica and grew up in Miami. My parents are both from here, Zagreb. They lived in Jamaica because my dad had a fibreglass business there.

My parents split up when I was about 7 and my mom had a time where she was deciding where she wanted me to grow up. So, we came back to Croatia, we tried Scotland, England and Spain. Then we went to Haiti, but on one of the layovers, we stopped in Miami. My mom liked it there and we ended up staying.

I have fewer memories from my early days in Jamaica. But, we still have friends there, like my Godparents, and we go back to visit every few years.

My mom was just 15 when she left Croatia and she moved to Venezuela. So, long before I was born she was tied into the Latin community. Miami has a big Latin community. It is huge.

Fuego Fresh Latin Food

When we first moved there we lived in downtown Miami. These days, it's all multi-million dollar properties. But, back then, it really wasn't the best place to live. Living there, I was always exposed to Latin life and culture. Those were our neighbours. My mom's best friends were Cuban, Venezuelan and Brazilian.

Even now, there are not so many Croatians there. More Serbians and Slovenes. I remember back in the day we all used to go to the same club – this ex-Yu place. But, when the war started, that all went to shit (laughs). We couldn't go there anymore.

Fuego Fresh Latin Food

My dad was actually trained as a chef and an engineer. He just chose to do something else. But, my uncle had the top French restaurant in Miami. My first job was working weekends there as a teenager, peeling potatoes and chopping onions. Over time, I learned the techniques of classic French cooking, from the bottom up. Originally, I was supposed to go to university to study law. But, I ended up instead going to culinary school.

After studies, I worked my way up - from line chef to sous chef to executive chef then restaurant owner. I had a 20-year career as a chef, almost exclusively within the top echelons of gourmet cooking – the total opposite end to the casual, approachable food we're doing here at Fuego!

Fuego Fresh Latin Food © Marc Rowlands

Miami is the home of 'Nuevo Latino' – New Latin American cooking. Basically, you take traditional Latin food but execute and present it in an elevated way. Very fancy. During my career, there were five chefs in the USA best recognised for pioneering this style of food. I worked for three of them.

These days, I split my time between the US and Croatia. I have business in the US. In the earlier days of the internet, before Facebook got really popular, I founded some meet-up groups, based on the common interest of food. I started off in one city with a group of thirty people. That thirty became three hundred. Then, three thousand. Then, thirty thousand. Now I have active groups in seven different cities. We have one hundred and fifty thousand members.

I organised trips for group members around the US. We would go to food festivals. But, because of my heritage, I had this urge to better reconnect with Croatia. So, I decided to start doing tours to here. That was in 2016.

Fuego Fresh Latin Food © Marc Rowlands

In a way, Fuego is a product of the pandemic. Travel and tourism were hugely affected by Covid. I had extra time on my hands and Fuego is the result. I also run 808, the bar next door, with my partner.

Coming from somewhere else, people like us can see that the food options in Zagreb are really quite limited. But, it's getting better! Certainly, it's a lot better now than it was when I first started to come here quite regularly.

We're going into our second month now. Right now we're only open for lunch (11am – 3.30pm), Monday – Friday. We're hoping to soon open for dinner too. People can eat the food next door in 808, or in any of the other cafe bars in our building.

Some of our dishes are genuine, authentic dishes of Mexico, Peru or Cuba. Others take inspiration from other Latin sources, like Venezuela or Chile.

Fuego Fresh Latin Food

Corn is a big staple in Mexico. And also in Croatia! In Croatia, you get corn in sandwiches. Or on pizza. That's really weird. But, OK. I can go with that. One of the dishes we have is Mexicorn. Basically, it's a cross between the crazy popular Mexican dish Elote and Croatian Francuska salata, with corn, sour cream, cream cheese, spices and some chilli.

Another dish is Bananas Latinas – bananas, black bean puree, sour cream, avocado, garlic sauce and pickled onions. It's sweet and salty, with citrus too. In Latin food there are a lot of overlaps.

Spices and chilli sauces at Fuego Fresh Latin Food

People ask “Is your food spicy?” Well, it can be. If you want it spicy, we can make it like that for you. But, generally, our food is just very well seasoned. We do use a lot of spices, but that doesn't necessarily translate to food that's too spicy or too hot.

Ita's Aji de Gallina Bowl at Fuego Fresh Latin Food © Marc Rowlands

This dish is Ita's Aji de Gallina Bowl, named after my mother-in-law. It's based on a traditional Peruvian dish, with pulled chicken in a creamy chilli sauce. It's served next to Papa a la Huancaina - another Peruvian dish - boiled potatoes in a creamy sauce.

We make our own corn tortilla chips in-house. Yes, it's a lot of effort to go to, a long process. But, the ones you can buy here just aren't the same. We couldn't serve those. If you taste them, you'll immediately know the difference. I wanted ours to stand out from anybody else's. And, we've succeeded in doing that, we've perfected them. Right now, we're in the process of perfecting our own tacos. I anticipate they'll be on the menu in a month or so.

You can visit Fuego Fresh Latin Food at Zelinska 7 on the edge of Lower Town (it's immediately behind Zagreb Holding) and you can check out their menu here.

You can check out more of Zagreb's international food options on Total Croatia News Gourmet pages here.

September 20, 2020 - Continuing our series on Zagreb’s international food offer and the stories behind these cuisines and businesses. This time, international food market Pekinška Patka

My name is Josip and I'm Croatian by birth. We opened Pekinška Patka in 2013. There was a real lack of stores like this in Croatia. My partner Andrea and I were sick of working for other people. Andrea has been a vegetarian for a long time and she likes cooking. I like travelling and trying new foods, so we both had an interest in international foods. We're also both big music fans.

The first places I started travelling to were Greece and Turkey. I must have returned to those countries 10 times now. They really aren't so far from here and, when you go, there's something really similar about them, yet at the same time the cultures are very different (from here). Croatia is a mix of cultures, we have influences from there. In Istanbul, you can even find ćevapčići. The food is often very fresh, lots of vegetable dishes. They take great care over their food. For instance, if a guy does gyros in Greece, he takes great pride in what he does. The ingredients are always the best. It's a job probably he will do his whole life. People who do that job in other places, they don't have that sense. For them, it's just work.

I visited Japan around 10 years ago for work. That was an excellent experience. I had plans for the first day I arrived, but they went out of the window. It was culture shock. I was there for around two weeks. I discovered ramen there. It was one of the easiest things for me to order. I ate sea urchins and onigiri. Everything was super tasty.

The stock in Pekinška Patka has been changing ever since we opened. We never used to have Mexican food. Now we have a whole shelf. And our Asian food range is now really big. We have foods and ingredients from India, the Middle East, Mexico, some from South America and also some West African basics like Egusi, Ogbono, Gari and Okra We try some things at home and if we want to promote them, we add them to the stock. Other new items come from customer requests.

It's difficult to say what are the most popular things we sell. Everyone comes for different things. Filipino customers like to pick up ingredients for their tamarind soup - Sinigang. Some Croatians only come for noodles and Asian food, others only for Mexican or to buy spices. Most of our customers are Croatian, after that, lots of Filipino people come here, Israeli students, ex-pats and members of different Asian communities here in Zagreb. We like it most when families come in with their kids and you see that a child of maybe 10 years old is crazy about Asian food. When we were kids, it was impossible for our parents to bring us to a shop like Pekinška Patka. They didn't exist here back then.

Right on cue, TCN's chat with Josip was halted by two delightful Filipino ladies coming into the store. Regular customers of Pekinška Patka, they were only too happy to tell TCN what they like about the shop

My name is Liezel and this is Marisol. We are from the Philippines. We discovered the shop on the internet maybe three months ago. We arrived in Croatia maybe one year ago. Life is much better since we discovered this store! We used to go to Metro, but it's far on the bus from where we live. They sell things here that we can't find in other supermarkets – good Oyster sauce, products we like from the Philippines, fish and snacks. The ingredients we buy here help us make some of our most famous national dishes, like pancit. You need special noodles to make it. Our Croatian friends are very curious about Filipino food. They love to try everything. And they like it, mostly.

Josip: Regular Croatian customers usually get more adventurous over time. They like trying new things. And they ask for recommendations, which I'm always happy to give. I've tried almost everything in the shop. In our house, we always have Lao Gan Ma chilli oils from China, Mexican salsa verde, Petjel peanut sauce from Indonesia, which is very aromatic and Japanese mayo, which I recommend to anyone who likes mayo. It's really special.

You can visit Pekinška Patka at Vlaška 78

All photos © Mateo Henec

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