Rare 125 Co-Owner Is a Restaurant and Puerto Rico Lifer
If you don’t have a passion for running restaurants, they will consume you and toss you aside like stale leftovers, but Xavier Toro, the co-owner and chef at Rare 125 in Santurce, says he thrives on the pace.
“I love the rush and the intensity of the work,” Toro told Real Puerto Rico, adding that he recently acquired a second location, Casa Italia in Hato Rey. “It keeps me open-minded and strong.”
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Toro learned the culinary arts attending Escuela Hotelera de San Juan, and has been working in the restaurant industry basically ever since. He’s worked as a bartender, a chef, and managed a number of restaurants.
Rare 125, which takes its name from the temperature of a perfectly cooked rare steak, sits in the Santurce neighborhood, about a 10-minute drive from the often-unbearable and traffic-heavy Condado. The restaurant attracts mostly locals, but has its share of tourist patrons, too.
The allures of La Placita, with all its nightlife and restaurants, is a few minutes away.
Toro wanted to create a neighborhood steakhouse that perhaps wasn’t as expensive as its peers in more popular areas of the San Juan metro area. He likes the old-school vibe of the neighborhood, and the architecture.
Toro takes pride in the creativity of the restaurant’s menu, including its side dishes, which gets revamped every four to five months. How many steakhouses do you know that serve lo mein?
Read Real Puerto Rico’s review of Rare 125 by Andrea Barr here.
To Toro, it’s not all about profit and loss. “We’ve been through a lot,” he said, ticking off disasters such as Hurricane Maria, the earthquakes and the pandemic.
He said Rare 125 at times fed people in the neighborhood for free during the depths of these crises.
With the pandemic winding down in this part of the globe, and Puerto Rico tourism breaking records, Toro and Rare 125 will probably be feeling that rush of excitement plenty of times more.