Many Friday nights, I’ve pulled up to the Richmond Costco to grab a quick, comforting dinner — not of the warehouse retailer’s famously cheap hot dogs and rotisserie chicken, but something much better: a heaping arroz con gandules combo plate from the food truck parked outside.
Such are the pleasures of Boriqua Kitchen. As the Bay Area’s only Puerto Rican food truck, it has routinely drawn big crowds at its regular stops — in Richmond, Vallejo and Oakland — where customers line up for chef-owner Darren Anthony Lamboy’s signature “#21 Roberto Clemente” (fried boneless chicken thigh pieces with rice, beans and sweet plantains); its crisp, garlicky tostones; and perhaps my favorite empanadas in the Bay — the deep-fried Puerto Rican variety, stuffed chock-full with incredibly juicy, well-seasoned ground beef.
All until this past spring, anyway, when Lamboy announced that the business was closing, at least until he was able to secure enough funds to purchase a new food truck.
Good news, though, for longtime customers in need of their sofrito and mayuketchup fix: Just three months later, Lamboy was in fact able to buy that new truck. Now, if all goes according to plan, the chef will launch Boriqua Kitchen 2.0 in the next couple of weeks — with an updated menu he promises will be bigger and better than ever.
Born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey (with its robust Puerto Rican community), Lamboy has been a staple of the Bay Area’s small but growing Puerto Rican food scene since the mid-2010s. He briefly helped out at Borinquen Soul — a legendary, now-shuttered spot inside an Oakland convenience store — before attending culinary school and then launching Boriqua Kitchen in 2017.