Sana Farm to Table in Rincon Offers Locally Sourced Food Rooted in Community

The evolution of Sana Farm to Table restaurant, next to the Rincon post office on PR-115, has all of the elements you can imagine in a culinary tale.

There’s a post-Hurricane Maria reinvention, bureaucratic snafus, perseverance, a family farm, community spirit as a motivator, and a wife-husband team passionate about locally sourced organic, vegetarian, vegan and pescatarian fare that had this writer scurrying back for another lunch just a couple of weeks after my first visit.

Owners Nito Granados and Talia Cruncleton outside Sana Farm to Table in Rincon, Puerto Rico.

During a recent lunchtime, the kitchen was buzzing, customers lined up three or four deep for vegan poke bowls or fish tacos to go; a couple of tables on the deck were occupied with patrons heads-down and concentrating on their veggie burgers and summer rolls or sipping a Sana signature fresh juice made from red beets, ginger, turmeric, pineapple, and cucumbers; and a woman perused containers of fruit, vegetables, and free range duck eggs, which are also for sale.

Owners Talia Cruncleton and Nito Granados, a wife and husband team, run the restaurant, which they officially opened in October 2018. The restaurant, though, traces its origins to their friends and previous owners Sonia Carlo and Javier Blondet, who had debuted a farm to table restaurant in the building next to the current location in mid-2018, just seven months after Hurricane Maria. Earlier, Sonia and Javier had operated a vegetable and fruit stand there.

Talia, born and raised in Rincon, and Nito, an accomplished sushi chef with Puerto Rican roots who moved to the island from California in 2010 to take over the family farm, met when they both worked at a local restaurant, formerly called Pool Bar Sushi.

After Hurricane Maria, with lots of down time for businesses around the island, Talia took a course in sustainable agriculture at the University of Puerto Rico, and Nito focused on his farm, where he’d been growing plantains, beans, peppers and zucchini.

When it came time for Talia to do volunteer work as part of her studies, she began working at Sonia and Javier’s restaurant, which they ended up shutting four months later.

“They left me the keys when they departed and asked for my help selling the business,” Talia said. “I was personally connected to the business, I saw how great it could be and especially how much people loved and appreciated food that was made with fresh local ingredients. After thinking on it for a few weeks, my husband and I decided that the business would be a perfect match for us since we were ready to move onto working for ourselves and we had the farm, the restaurant knowledge and resources to make it work.”

When you eat at Sana Farm to Table, you feel like you are doing something healthy for yourself and good for humanity. But here’s the thing: Dining there is not a laborious exercise in social action — the food, the juices, and the cocktails are savory and memorable.

Sana tries to source as much as the food as possible locally from area farms, and from fishermen and women who the couple know personally and follow sustainable practices, Talia said, adding they oppose commercial fishing.

“We import a couple items, such as summer roll wraps, seaweed salad, and sesame seeds, but we try to use only the local and organic veggies,” she said. “These are sourced through our farm as well as several other small local farms and distributors that offer local produce.”

For that reason, the menu is subject to change based on what’s available.

The restaurant doesn’t use any preprocessed food, and you won’t find any juices made from concentrate. The veggie burgers aren’t boxed and stored in a freezer before preparation, but are created from scratch.

“If the surf is up, sometimes fishermen can’t fish, or if it rains too hard, crops can get destroyed,” Talia said. “We offer what is available and when it’s available and fortunately the hiccups tend to be few and far between.”

The business has had its share of challenges. It had to close for a couple of months in 2019, and then redo the menu because Sana was unable “to renew our business permits because of a technicality” that the landlord had to deal with in court, Talia said. Among the casualties lost from the menu were pad Thai, vegetable curry, and the liquor license.

“I think folks may have been a little disappointed that we had to slim down the menu, but the support we continued to receive from our community was astounding,” she said. “To this day they are what keeps us going forward — our community, our regulars.”

Earlier, the restaurant had closed for a month during the beginning of the pandemic, but otherwise kept operating. “I like to think we helped provide a sense of normalcy and comfort during a very uncertain time for everyone,” Talia said.

Those community ties run deep. Talia and Nito, one of Sana’s two main chefs, supply micro greens to many area restaurants. And there is a sense of comaradarie with area chefs and restaurant entrepreneurs.

When it comes to kitchen duties, one of Nito’s fortes is filleting the fresh fish and supplying the fresh vegetables, and his wife said “he makes the prettiest summer rolls with edible flowers.”

The other main chef is Arquiel Carlo, who is Cordon Bleu-trained, and has worked at Sana since its birth. “He adds a creative twist and zest to every dish,” Talia said. “He’s also a great baker and the one responsible for our freshly baked breads.”

She said “business is great, but still is a challenge.” Sana expanded in September, but — you guessed it — there were more permit problems.

“Turns out the permits for the building we were originally in, still weren’t going to be ready two years later, but the landlord again came through by setting up a container kitchen and bar on the property,” Talia said. “Little by little, we’ve been working on improving this new space, recently adding the greenhouse and deck seating options. We still hope to expand into the building once it’s ready.”

The tourists are now packing Rincon. With the busy season beginning, Sana Farm to Table has expanded its hours. It’s now open Thursday to Monday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

As for the future, the owners hope to see “the restaurant operating like a well-oiled machine with fewer hiccups,” Talia said.

Expansion is definitely part of the dream, and of course, there is a community tie-in.

She said: “We do plan to expand once more to complete our final vision of integrating the building as part of a central area and storefront where we can also offer local farmers and artisans a space to sell their products.”