This restaurant highlighting Afro-Panamanian cuisine attracts a global clientele
But can tourists be trusted to honor the Panama City neighborhood it calls home?
I sat in the Panama City fish market with restaurant owner Danny Jules as he waited for a vendor to scale his fish. We were up before the sun on a drizzly Friday morning.
I was taking Jules’ first ever cooking tour, a trial run before he opens up to the public. The tour felt more like an apprenticeship. This was no sugar coated excursion. It was a real-life glimpse into the daily grind of owning and operating a restaurant. He starts by waking up at 4 am to get to the fish market an hour later. I tried to hide my yawn as we chatted.
“Let me show you what they posted. Can I send this to you?” Jules asked.
The video he showed me had been bothering Jules for days. Pulled from someone’s Instagram account, it showed a party of seven sitting at Jules’ restaurant.
“We all got dressed up thinking we’re going to dinner at a nice, fancy place and then this person right here, the birthday girl, did not tell us we was finna be straight up in the hood,” the woman said as she showed her friends and the neighborhood behind them.
Jules looked dejected, shaking his head as he heard the woman’s words.
Peach Fuzz International is not found in Panama City’s tourist district, nor is it listed in any tourism brochures. When I told a taxi driver where I wanted to go, the driver replied, “Are you sure?”
Tourists who insist on going eat the best plate of fried fish many say they’ve ever had. Those who return to Panama make it a part of their itinerary to return for another fried snapper or snook. One dedicated customer is known to leave the airport on layovers to get a plate of fish.
“Really, I’m far more famous in the U.S. than I am in my own country,” Jules said. “In the beginning, a lot of my customers were tourists, then the local guys started getting wind of it.”
Out-of-town customers know about Jules’ fried fish because of other tourists’ strong recommendations; Jules has built a reputation among Black American travelers in particular, with word of his delicious Afro-Panamanian dishes spreading through travel groups like Nomadness Travel Tribe.
He plans to use cooking tours to build on that reputation and teach others the art of Afro-Panamanian cooking, but he isn’t sure it’ll be accepted by tourists who don’t understand his connection to Curundú.
Jules was born in Panama City’s Curundú neighborhood, three blocks away from his restaurant. His family then moved to Rio Abajo, another historically Black immigrant neighborhood.
Jules operates his business in Curundú because he enjoys being a pillar of the neighborhood. He hires people from his community to do odd jobs and to work full-time. The neighbors know Jules; many stop by to say hello.
It's clear the neighborhood looks out for its own because others have not. Panama City residents call Curundú a red zone area. Uber refuses to pick up riders from the area in the evening hours.
Can tourists be trusted to respect Curundú while they wait for an order of pescado frito?
In 1972, Jules started his culinary training with his grandmother, Millicent Louis Wade.
Wade had emigrated to Panama from Barbados with her family in 1910 at the age of three. As a grandmother, she made it a priority to teach each grandson how to cook using traditional Bajan techniques.
“What adds to the flavor of it is understanding that history,” Javier Wallace, Race and Sport Postdoctoral Associate in Duke University’s African and African American Studies program, said. Wallace, who is of Panamanian and American descent, leads tours that highlight Black history in both countries.
“I can taste the influences of Black West Indians, particularly those who came from Barbados and Jamaica to Panama at the construction of the canal and then also from the 1850s with the [Panama] railroad.”
From 1850-1920, an estimated 70,000 Black West Indians emigrated from the Caribbean to Panama to build the country’s major infrastructure.
“Their relationships to colonialism, their relationships with the concept of Africa and the food ways that they bring into the Republic of Panama, has a long-standing African presence,” Wallace said. “Because of different colonial entanglements over the centuries, they're bringing some additional things into the Republic’s cooking like curry and turmeric.”
For these immigrants, English also became a form of resistance to the Spanish-speaking Panamanian establishment that made it clear they were not fully welcomed in Panama.
“It's a part of that legacy in Panama of the people who came to literally modernize the country yet were not welcomed in the country. They were what you might call the forever foreigner and only tolerated because they were there to construct and do things that the country needed,” Wallace said.
In 2014, an American tourist living in Panama stopped in the San Felipe Nettie Market. Nigel Fleming was used to being the only American in this market, but on this day, he saw someone who reminded him of home.
“I saw Danny talking and something about his mannerisms– you know the way New Yorkers talk with their hands? Something about this guy reminded me of a New Yorker, so just out of curiosity I went up to him and was like, ‘You look like you’re from New York.’”
Fleming’s hunch was right. Jules was born in Panama, but spent his teenage and young adult years in Brooklyn. As they talked, Jules invited Fleming to check out his restaurant.
A few days later, Fleming took him up on the offer.
“It's beautiful. It's like walking into your cousin’s backyard in the summertime at a cookout and all your cousins are there,” Fleming said. “Over there just felt really safe, like the community was protecting itself. Everyone knew whose kids belonged to who, and what area they lived in. And you just see groups of kids like the rugrats. Four or five kids are just walking down the street and coming up to Danny and Danny's talking to them and they're sitting in his lap and telling stories, all while he's frying fish and I'm just like, ‘this is so cool.’”
That was the first of many trips Fleming made to Peach Fuzz International. The next time he went, he brought friends.
I hauled a ten pound bag of limes from the taxi to the front of Jules’ restaurant. “Surely he won’t use all of these limes,” I thought to myself as he called a neighbor to help him lift the gate and set up tables and chairs outside his open air kitchen.
After Jules methodically washed his hands, set up bowls, and sharpened his knife, he sat down to cut what felt like a hundred limes. He was steadily slicing every lime in the bag.
After Jules finished, I squeezed limes and learned this mild variety of the fruit, not found in the United States, would make the base of the mud – a dark red marinade full of spices.
Jules gave me kind but firm instructions over my shoulder as I cleaned a fish for the first time. Then he showed me how to scar a fish – 12 slices on each side – to make sure the marinade with his secret combination of spices soaks through every bite of fish.
By lunch time, the first fish was sizzling in oil and customers began lining up in anticipation. My eyes were heavy from the early morning alarm, but I was determined to eat the fish I helped prepare.
When the crowd subsided, Jules gave me a plate: fried snook with cassava fries. The first thing I appreciated was how easy it was to grab a bite-sized piece of fish with my fingers and plop it in my mouth thanks to the criss-cross pattern we used to cut the fish.
The bite was too hot to savor, but it was enough for me to register its perfection. The flaky protein was light and slightly acidic, delightfully contrasting the salty crunch of the skin.
I understood why travelers would risk missing a connecting flight to get another taste of this seafood. Why Jules told me the group that joked about Curundú eventually told him they’d return to eat again.
This flavor could easily become a traveler’s defining memory of the taste of Panamanian food. But this cuisine, while enjoyed in Panama, cannot be defined by the borders of one country.
This is the generational gift of immigrants. The tourists who understand that treasure the combination of histories on their plate.
Very cool, thank you so much