Puerto Rican chefs came to Colorado after disaster. Now, they’re living their dream of sharing Boricua cuisine.

PARKER, Colo. — In the small town of Parker, south of Denver, an old home converted into a restaurant invites guests to experience the Caribbean through food, music and colorful decor.

Chef Jose Rivera and his wife Karen Reyes opened Isla Verde to share the flavors they grew up with on the island of Puerto Rico.

“It was a new experience for us, a new challenge, because Parker is not recognized for having a lot of Latino community,” said Rivera. Only about 12% of the town’s population comes from Latin America, and across Colorado, less than 3% of the state’s population originally comes from Puerto Rico.

“It was our opportunity to bring our colors, flavors, music, atmosphere, to a place that it hasn’t been before,” he said.

Rivera and Reyes run the restaurant with the help of their children, son-in-law and employees they say have become family too.

The chefs grew up around cooking and fell in love over their shared goal to share those recipes with others.

“My father used to have a restaurant back home in Ponce, Puerto Rico,” Rivera said. It was there he met Reyes. They got married and went to culinary school together.

“That’s when the love for the Caribbean cuisine started between the two of us,” Rivera said. “She was more on the sweet side, and I was more on the savory, salty, fried stuff,” he said.

It was a natural disaster in 1998 that brought them to Colorado.

“Hurricane Georges pretty much destroyed my dad’s restaurant, and it was really hard to get back up on our feet,” Rivera said.

Their family moved to the Front Range and cooked everywhere from hotels to schools and hospitals. Then they found community with immigrants from other Caribbean islands.

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