I’ve enjoyed many introductory bites over the years, but until now, I can’t recall a single one that tried to erase the hard line between candy and animal. This piece of pork skin crackles like brittle, though with the faintest caramel chewiness, while whispering promises of the lechón yet to come. This sliver speaks of smoke and salt and the adobo aromatics of young pork meat that has been roasting for hours, all under the protective shell of that hardened skin.
This piece of pork brittle is a gift, I realize, but it’s also a tease, every bit as effective as the open trailer attached to the Lechonera truck, the one in which 60-pound sucklings slowly rotate over logs of smoldering white oak. Between the pork skin, the spinning pigs and the inescapable wood-smoke perfume that saturates the air, I can barely hold a thought, save for this: My lechón cannot arrive fast enough.
Lechonera DMV is the purest expression of Puerto Rican lechón around these parts, and it owes its existence to a pair of chefs who grew up on the island and basically decided to extend la Ruta del Lechón, the “pork highway” that winds through the hills and mountains of their homeland, all the way to Woodbridge. Richard Torres Meléndez and Mario Ernesto Corona Ruiz were raised on different parts of the island — Torres in Juana Diaz in the south, Corona Ruiz in Aguada in the west — and had disparate influences that nonetheless led them to the same place.
As a kid, Torres was surrounded by cooking professionals: His great-grandfather was a baker who carved out a niche as one of the finest pig roasters in Juana Diaz. His grandmother prepared food for the school system, back when cafeterias actually cooked from scratch. His dad ran a restaurant in nearby Ponce, specializing in classic French dishes that he learned from chefs back in New York. Corona Ruiz, on the other hand, grew up the son of a Mexico-born doctor and a Puerto Rican teacher who valued the ritual of the evening meal, with the entire family gathered ’round the table promptly at 5 p.m. But Corona Ruiz was also the first of the two budding cooks to receive training, starting at age 13, at a culinary school in San Juan.
Their paths didn’t cross until both men attended Johnson & Wales in North Miami, a campus that has since closed. One summer between semesters, Corona Ruiz called Torres out of the blue, looking for work so that he could remain in Miami during the break. Torres secured his new friend a gig with him at a demanding hotel restaurant; they’ve remained inseparable ever since. By their own count, the chefs have worked together at six or seven establishments, culminating with a multiyear run with the Farmers Restaurant Group, the umbrella company behind high-volume establishments in the District, Tysons and elsewhere.
By the time Torres and Corona Ruiz resolved to set their own course, they had a deep reservoir of skills to draw from: fine-dining chops, robata grill experience, Asian-fusion knowledge, seasonal menu development, you name it. But a decade after they started their journey in professional kitchens, the chefs understood all this experience would serve something more personal: their own lechónera, a mobile operation that supplements its weekend hours with catering and events. Their business would plant a flag, literally and figuratively. Lechonera DMV would announce that its wood-fired cooking, whose techniques trace back to Indigenous Caribbean cultures, is a craft that deserves the same respect and recognition as regional American barbecue in the Lower 48.
Lechonera is a food truck that behaves more like a restaurant, as that pork-skin offering suggests. Torres and Corona Ruiz — along with Keysi Torres Colina (spouse of Torres), Amy Molina (fiancée of Corona Ruiz) and Hugo Fortiz (a former customer, now a partner) — provide the kind of hospitality you might expect from a place with four walls and a larger staff. Molina is often the one taking your order, patiently explaining everything on the tight, focused menu. She might even sell you a little lechón a la carte, if the demand for pork is running slow that day. Behind the truck, you’ll often find Corona Ruiz, breaking down a suckling pig with a machete, more than willing to pose for your Instagram reel if you ask. You might even get sucked into a game of dominoes with one of the chefs as they roast meats before service, the salsa and bomba rhythms thumping in the background.
The truck’s professionalism extends to its menu concept: It channels the kind of fast-casual vibe common to suburban strip centers and urban corridors. Every one of the featured meats can be ordered as part of a rice bowl, a savvy solution to ease customers unfamiliar with lechón and longaniza sausage into the fold.
The lechón bowl is a neat stack of roast pork — your mixed meats might include shoulder, leg, loin and skin, paired with a sweet-onion escabeche and a plantain relish — atop whatever rice the guys are preparing fresh that day. Served with a pair of sauces, including a housemade pique infused with hot peppers, the lechón bowl is a bottomless pit of delights. One forkful might unearth a nugget of pork — salty, garlicky, subtly smoky — that has become electrified with pique. Another might ensnare some caramelized plantains buried in a heap of rice and pigeon peas, the sweet and the savory locked into one ardent embrace.
The beauty of Lechonera DMV is how it balances tradition with a dedication to the evolution of the craft. The chefs tell me their rub is the same one that earned Torres’s great-grandfather, Don Manuel, so much respect back in his day. But Torres and Corona Ruiz have learned to apply the elder’s minimalist adobo — salt, garlic, pepper and oregano, supplemented with a housemade annatto oil rubbed over the animal — in ways that leave the meat moister and more consistent than the traditional multiday cure. Even their sauces are sometimes supplemented with ingredients not standard to the Puerto Rican table: The mayo-ketchup, for instance, smuggles in Worcestershire sauce and gochujang, deepening the flavors of everything it touches.
Outside the realm of lechón, the operation also serves up chicken, St. Louis-style barbecue ribs and longaniza sausage, each of which slowly renders into its concentrated, recognizable form inside that custom-made hot box attached to the truck. The ribs, sticky and slightly sweet, are paired with a Kansas City-style barbecue sauce, while the lechónera chicken is a smoke-scented bird stuffed with rice and pigeon peas, animated by the accompanying piñeta sauce with its caramelized pineapple and fermented chile peppers. Both have their pleasures, but if I’m not indulging in lechón, I’m burying my face in ropy lengths of longaniza, these housemade links stuffed with coarsely ground pork rubbed with annatto oil and ignited with Thai chiles. Whatever you order, finish it with tres leches, a silky interpretation topped with vanilla-enhanced whipped cream.
On Christmas, many Puerto Ricans will plot a route to their favorite place along la Ruta del Lechón to celebrate the holiday with friends, family and lots of slow-roasted pork. It’s a ritual second to none on the island, and now Washingtonians can experience a version of it for themselves, any time of year, thanks to this exquisite lechónera.
1325 Old Bridge Rd., in the Occoquan Commuter Parking Lot, Woodbridge, Va.; lechoneradmv.com.
Hours: 1 to 6 p.m. (or whenever food runs out) on Saturday and Sunday.
Prices: $2.99 to $29.99 for all items on the menu, excluding a family package that serves four.