Ocean Front Restaurant Owner Saw an Untapped Opportunity in Isabela, Puerto Rico

Carlos Torres, the owner of Ocean Front Hotel & Restaurant in Isabela, had been living in the States in the late 1980s and realized that his family was missing out on a great opportunity back home in Puerto Rico.

Carlos Torres, the owner of Ocean Front Hotel & Restaurant, on the deck of the Isabela restaurant with Playa Jobos in the background.

Born in New York, but having grown up and been educated in Puerto Rico, Torres found himself back in New York “going out to restaurants and eating good,” he told Real Puerto Rico on a recent Friday afternoon. His father had owned the property that the restaurant and hotel currently sit on in Isabela, but leased it out to others, which meant his family had never operated its own business there.

“He never worked there,” Torres said of his father. “Nobody from the family worked there. And when I became middle age, I used to live in the States, and I knew this would be a beautiful spot to open a restaurant.”

And, indeed it was.

A view from the deck of Ocean Front Hotel & Restaurant toward the beach on a previous visit in February, 2021.

Torres opened the restaurant here 32 years ago, and his chef, Luis Feliciano, has been there for 28 of those. Read Real Puerto Rico’s review of Ocean Front here.

Torres said he knew nothing about the restaurant business when he returned to Isabela to open Ocean Front. He said it’s a tough business, and “I would not recommend it to anybody right now.”

For 13 years, Ocean Front was open seven days per week. “We decided we needed to take a break, and now we’re open from Wednesday to Sunday. While Ocean Front obviously faces the ocean, Torres also operates a sushi bar facing the street on PR 4666, and that’s open Thursday to Sunday starting at 4 p.m.

About the challenges of running a restaurant these days, Torres said his costs, everything from oil, meats and fish, “have skyrocketed, maybe double or more.”

Ocean Front sources most of its seafood locally, including octopus, mahi-mahi, tuna and red snapper, and the rest the restaurant gets from a distributor.

Torres didn’t know anything about the restaurant business when he started out, but obviously learned along the way. In the interim, Hurricane Maria “knocked everything down, including the balconies and all the glass,” he said.

Then came Covid-19. “We suffered a lot, and there was no business for the first four or five months,” Torres said. He got permission to open one of the restaurant’s window and Ocean Front began selling takeout, did delivery, and eventually “the business started booming again,” Torres said.

In the summer, Torres’ main customers are people who live in Puerto Rico, including many from the San Juan metro area. Tourists, many of them Americans, start showing up in droves in the winter.

Many tourists miss out on Isabela’s natural beauty and remain shackled to the San Juan area. Nearby Jobos Beach has hosted international surfing competitions, and a boardwalk leads people along jagged rock formations, which the waves pound every few seconds, overlooking the beach and the surfers below.

Along the Jobos beach boardwalk in Isabela, two beachgoers seemingly had the beach and the waves nearly all to themselves, as seen during an earlier visit in February 2021

Recalling the dark days after Hurricane Maria in September 2017, Torres said that “we almost lost the building. So we did what we could with what we had.”

To an outsider, that seemed like a long time ago as Torres posed for a couple of photos on the restaurant’s deck. Looking out toward Playa Jobos, the sun was bright after a brief downpour, the wind was swirling, and inside you could hear the muffled sounds of dishes and silverware clanking against the tables.

Asked what else we need to know about Ocean Front restaurant, Torres said: “Well, there’s not much more. I mean, we still have great food.”