The Valencian who has been cooking paellas under the mountains of Costa Rica for almost 30 years

“Don Vicente, I see you very well!” says an older woman with the food menu in her hands.

At the next table, a young man interrupts their conversation to stand up and shake his hand: “Don Vicente, I saw you on TV the other day!”

Vicente Aguilar Cerezo, 76, walks through his restaurant, La Lluna de Valencia, and makes sure to welcome all his first customers of the day in the enormous main room of this more than 100-year-old building, which was once a house aristocratic.

“It has the old flavor of a landowner's house from here in the area,” says Aguilar.

The “zone” is Santa Bárbara, a coffee-growing town of about 6,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of the Costa Rica metropolitan area, beneath the mountains.

But the food is, like its owner, totally Spanish.

On the day of this visit, Vicente offers steak and shrimp as dishes of the day and, like every Sunday for almost three decades, he will prepare a huge paella for dozens of people.

As a Valencian, rice dishes are his specialty.

He has been preparing them for 28 years in this unusual location for a Spanish restaurant.

“Here I started cooking alone, no one gave two pesetas for me.

They told me that it was the least suitable place to open a restaurant,” says the chef, who expects to serve about 150 people that day, although it could be even more.

The previous Sunday, he says, he had his house filled with 180 customers.

Santa Barbara is not a central location to travel from the city, but many drive up to an hour or more from the capital, San José, to try the food.

“Everyone has passed through here, even presidents, former presidents, politicians and businessmen,” he says when showing the photos that decorate the room.

Rice with vegetables and seafood, from La Lluna de Valencia, in Costa Rica.

Lyon photography

Vicente Aguilar was born in “a small town near Valencia,” although he hesitates to specify the exact location: “Sometimes I don't know if it is Alboraya, which is a town known for its tiger nuts, or if I am from Meliana.

But hey, there is an orchard between those two towns.

“I was born there,” he specifies.

He never received any professional training in cooking.

He learned, he says, with his parents and grandparents, as one of all the housework tasks.

“Since I was five years old I made breakfast for my grandfather and from there comes a little love for cooking,” he explains.

Vicente does not like the word “chef”, since it is “a little too broad” for him.

He prefers “artisan” because, like his younger brother, Toni, who has a restaurant in Valencia called Barraca de Toni Montoliu, he taught himself.

Grilled octopus with potatoes.

David Cordero Rivera

When La Lluna de Valencia opened, Vicente had never even cooked in a restaurant.

He arrived in Costa Rica in 1982, when he was working as a consultant for United Nations projects in Central America and the Caribbean.

He had lived in Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic.

Central America, he says, hooked him ever since.

When his second daughter was born, he decided to move to Costa Rica because the political situation in the rest of the region was “quite difficult.”

“Costa Rica offered all the advantages of living with a family.

It is a country that does not have an army and it shows.

The people here are calm and pleasant,” he says.

Vicente quickly detected an important gastronomic similarity between his native Valencia and his new home: “Costa Ricans and Valencians have in common that we can eat rice in the morning, at noon and at night.

Here they have the gallo pinto and the casado and they eat a lot, a lot of rice.”

García arrived in Costa Rica in 1982, when he worked as a consultant for United Nations projects in Central America and the Caribbean.

Lyon photography

In 1996, with his consulting days behind him, he bought the land in Santa Barbara and embarked on this new company as a cook.

He says that at that time there were very few Spanish restaurants in the country and that several closed over the years.

“For a long time I remained the reference for Spanish cuisine,” he says.

Of the pioneers of Spanish gastronomy from those years, only La Lluna Valenciana and another restaurant called Costa del Sol remain, in the province of Puntarenas, on the Pacific coast (more than three hours by car from Santa Bárbara).

In recent years, however, new venues have begun to pop up in the city.

“All those currently in Costa Rica have a very high level, but there is no Spanish restaurant that is older than mine,” says the chef.

Aguilar emphasizes the word “Spanish” because his restaurant serves a little of everything, from Galician octopus and Madrid-style tripe, to Cordoban oxtail.

He says that, with the growth of Spain as a tourist destination, it is increasingly common for Costa Ricans to be familiar with Spanish cuisine and ask for a dish that is not on the menu.

“They tell me: 'Vicente, can't you make some broken eggs?'”

The big star, however, is and always has been paella.

What “80 or 90%” of customers order is paella, which costs the equivalent in colones (the local currency) of about 30 euros per plate.

Tapas range between approximately 12 and 16 euros.

Serving of croquettes.

David Cordero Rivera

While supervising the wood-fired paella prepared by one of the cooks, Aguilar assures that it tastes just like one made in Spain.

In Costa Rica he gets Bomba rice from the Albufera in Valencia (yes, for almost six times the price of national rice) and most of the other ingredients.

From the garden he has at the entrance he gets almost all the condiments and there is very little that he orders brought from abroad because he cannot find it in Costa Rica, such as saffron.

As for seafood, he explains that the hot waters of the tropics produce a less salty flavor than the fresh waters of the Mediterranean, so he must season the local product more to give it the same flavor.

His paella has earned him recognition in his homeland.

The walls of the room are decorated by the third place prize of the 2017 Sueca International Valencian Paella Contest, the 2020 Golden Spoon of the Valencian Community and the first place of the 2022 Paella Festival.

He won the recognitions in Valencia, but the statuettes come to Costa Rica because he is from both places.

“They have even changed my name.

Now I am 'Vicentico' ('Ticos' is what they call Costa Ricans), I have the nationality and I feel very proud that Costa Rica opened its arms to me.

I live in a blessed country that has no army.

“I have learned a lot from their idiosyncrasies and I have contributed something from Spanish culture,” he says.

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