Lulú Berlú is a large boutique in town owned by Natacha Nokin, a local artist who also hand-crafted many of the delicate coconut shell lamps and mosaic mirrors that hang in the hotel. “Looking over at the ocean, everything was moving, lots of fish, and it was so green.” “Back then there was so much lobster you could walk out on the beach and pick out your lobster in the nighttime with a torch with some kerosene and a little rag,” he says of his childhood. As for the food itself, Selvin recommends the rondón, a coconut milk-based seafood soup that’s a staple of Afro-Caribbean cuisine, and the sautéed lobster, which is prepared with butter, garlic, and onion.
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It’s a charming open-air restaurant framed by beautiful, natural wood-there’s even a tree growing straight through the middle of it all-which allows full view of the jungle that Selvin grew up in.
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Then, people would meander from the beach to the restaurant, thanks to Selvin’s little beachfront sign, to try the Caribbean food that his mother, auntie, and (14!) siblings taught him how to cook when he was younger. “There was no road, no electricity, just a little trail leading from the beach to the restaurant,” Selvin says of the early days of the business. Selvin’s roots in the community run deep-his family first moved to the Limon province from Jamaica in 1918-and his food is a favorite amongst the community (Rohrmoser and Steinvorth have been eating there for years).
Selvin Brown opened his namesake restaurant, the first in the region, in 1982. She rebuilt them with a more Victorian touch, true to the architecture of the area-it was first colonized by the British, who built small banana plantation cottages that sit high above the ground to protect the structures from sudden rain swells. True to her artistic practice, Steinvorth recycled as much of the old wood as she could from the little homes that used to sit on the property. Steinvorth bought the property next to her home overlooking the crystal clear Caribbean sea, the old Hotel Aguas Claras, where she actually used to stay when she first started coming to the area. “The whole process has been like a story,” Steinvorth says, one that’s unspooled over the past few years. 30 years on, she’s brought together all of these various interests with Hotel Aguas Claras. Then she owned and operated a small shop in San José where she sold her own hand-crafted goods, much of which she made from recycled materials. It was very simple, but everything was so beautiful and easygoing that I didn’t care if we didn’t have light or water,” Steinvorth says.Īt that point in time, Steinvorth worked as a translator after moving on from a nascent career as a ballerina. “We had to shower very quickly because we used water from the rain. The first paved road was laid about 8 years ago-before then, people would just ride their bikes everywhere, which is still the preferred way to get around for most locals. Even in 1995, there were only three phones in the village, so people would wait in long lines to make calls. “Back then, there were no lights, no water, nothing,” Steinvorth says. She eventually purchased a rustic house, which looks much like the private little cabins of the hotel, with her late partner they would come to escape from the city. “After I came to visit we started coming every month,” she says. Less than a 5-hour drive from the capital, the small town felt like a completely different world than the one she was used to.
She grew up in the mountains surrounding San José, riding horses and swimming in the nearby river, but she had never heard of Puerto Viejo. Steinvorth first traveled to Puerto Viejo 32 years ago after the tropical locale came up in conversation with one of her colleagues.
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