Long Beach’s Hottest Street Food Stand Serves Dreamy Puerto Rican Food Every Weekend

Since the age of 13, Iris Negron has learned the secrets of her family’s Puerto Rican food while growing up in Ponce, where she mastered the recipes through years of observation and practice. In 1968, she, her husband Ramon, and their budding family moved to California in search of better job opportunities and to reunite with family already living in the Golden State. Negron started selling food at Rock of Salvation church in Wilmington in the 1970s, later picking up catering jobs from church members in the community. The demand for her fragrant pollo guisado, garlicky mofongo relleno, and fluffy rellenos de papa grew into a larger-scale operation, but she stopped toward the end of the decade due to health concerns she was experiencing.

While all five of Iris’s children grew up with her delicious home cooking, only her daughter Maria took a deeper interest in learning the sacred family recipes, like arroz con gandules, a foundational dish of rice and pigeon peas. Concerned that her mother’s recipes would be lost, Maria meticulously studied them over the course of three decades, eventually learning her mother’s sazón (spice mix or seasoning). “Nothing is written or measured in our cooking, so you have to watch and learn,” says Maria.

Some time ago, Maria and her son Eddie were having lunch with Iris, when the 77-year-old cook, now retired, said to them, “One day, I want to sell my food in a restaurant before my time is up.” Moved by her dream, Eddie and Maria opened a Puerto Rican-style street stand called La Casa de Iris in 2023, which operates inside a red, blue, and white tent decked out with Puerto Rican flags, including a yellow stripe emblazoned with the phrase “El Sabor de Puerto Rico.”

During the week, Maria is employed in the Environmental Services department at a Kaiser hospital, and her son Eddie works as a longshoreman. Maria taught Eddie and other family members her mother’s recipes, and Eddie scraped together the kitchen equipment and tent. For much of their first year in business, they served customers among a sizable gathering of street vendors at the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Figueroa in Wilmington, but they didn’t always feel welcome there. “There were many vendors that had been there for a while, and the energy from some of them wasn’t good,” says Maria.

In April 2024, they moved their colorful tent into the parking lot of Catalyst, a cannabis dispensary in Long Beach just off the 405 Freeway. Iris Negron came to help inaugurate the new opening, giving her stamp of approval to the relocated street kitchen. “It’s not exactly a restaurant, but it’s a start,” says Eddie.

All dishes are made to order, so plan on a wait, because this family’s mission statement is to fulfill a dream — not make fast-food. “Puerto Rican food has a unique flavor, sazón, and it has to be correct,” says Maria. The family has worked together, learning to operate as they go. Maria’s niece Cristina Martinez runs the register; her other niece Alexis Martinez cooks; and Edwin, Maria’s oldest brother, acts as a gregarious host who also helps manage the business. Despite walking a tightrope for each service, the food comes out as bold as the matriarch intended.

The menu starts with frituras (fried foods), starring pastel pastelillos (turnovers) filled with moist ground beef and potato, and warm, spongy rellenos de papa, or potato balls filled with the same mixture. Iris Negron, a 33-year-old who carries her grandmother’s namesake, carefully forms each ball, as if guided by the elder Iris’s hand. If the potato balls at Cuban bakery Porto’s are the stuff of legend, Iris Negron’s rellenos de papa may be even better: a plush, tender exterior encircles a seasoned interior that is more layered in its flavor profile.

La Casa de Iris’s Puerto Rican tamales, called pasteles, are made from a blend of yucca, plantain, pumpkin, and sazón. They’re then filled with chicken, bits of corn, bell pepper, potato, and green olives seasoned with adobo. The pasteles are tightly wrapped in banana leaves, enclosed in parchment paper, and wound by string in square lashings.

One trendy dish that comes almost straight from the island are called vasos Boricuas (Boricua cups), or vasos de pinchos (skewer cups). They’re prepared by lining a plastic cup with mayo-ketchup, arroz con gandules, crumbled chicharrón, balls of mofongo, and a choice of beef, guava-marinated chicken, or pernil (roasted pork leg). A lone skewer of meat set in the center of the cup is topped with a tostón (fried, mashed plantain) and a piece of toasted bread. The spectacle of this Puerto Rican trophy dish being carried away by customers, with its glowing autumn colors and mixed textures, turns heads, like watching an Olympic torch relay. For first-timers, it’s often an immediate order — no questions asked.

More classic dishes like pernil or pollo guisado — a quarter chicken marinated in spices then cooked with tomatoes, annato oil, culantro, garlic, onion, and sofrito — are another way to experience Iris’s timeless recipes. “The pollo guisado sort of has all of my grandmother’s seasonings in one dish,” says Eddie. The fork-tender chicken swims in a gently tangy stew and comes served with arroz con gandules.

Other Puerto Rican delights include the fragile yet impressive jibarito, a beef or pernil sandwich dressed with tomatoes, avocado slices, slivers of purple onion, and streaks of mayo-ketchup in between two flat crescents of fried plantains and mofongo. Iris’s mofongo, a mash of fried, green plantains, garlic, and chicharron, comes sold as a side or an entree stuffed with pernil, beef, or chicken. The garlic-kissed mofongo is moist and pliable, with a pleasant grainy bite coming from ample chicharrón laced within it.

In the two months since relocating to Long Beach, Puerto Ricans and other loyal customers show up as soon as they open each Saturday to get a taste before the stand sells out. Each plate is a loving tribute to the elder Iris Negron, whose Puerto Rican cooking thrives inside a colorful tent tucked behind a cannabis shop. For Maria and Eddie, this is just the first step toward having a permanent restaurant. “My son told his grandma, ‘I don’t have a lot of money, but I promise I’ll do whatever it takes to make this happen,’” says Maria.

3170 Cherry Avenue, Long Beach, Saturdays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., or until sold out.