ChicagoThe jibarito has a specific birthplace. In 1996, cook Juan "Peter" Figueroa at Borinquen Restaurant in Humboldt Park swapped the bread on a steak sandwich for two slabs of fried, flattened green plantain, and Chicago's Puerto Rican community gave the city one of its defining sandwiches. Three decades later, Paseo Boricua — the stretch of Division Street marked by two towering steel Puerto Rican flags — is still the place that idea calls home. It's also, as of 2025, where Smash Jibarito opened its permanent doors.
The Weekend It Started
Founder Josean Irizarry didn't set out to build a restaurant. In 2022, he saw a friend's jibarito sliders on Instagram, and instead of filing it away as a nice idea, he bought ground beef and plantains the next day. By that weekend, he had a working version. That's the entire founding story: no test kitchen, no investors, just a recipe good enough to turn into a pop-up almost immediately.
From Pop-Up to Residency
David Matulac joined the project in 2023, and the two spent the next stretch proving the idea could hold up outside a one-off pop-up. Starting in 2024, they ran a kitchen residency inside Desert Hawk Bar in West Town — the kind of arrangement that lets a young concept build a following without the overhead of its own lease, while the founders figure out whether the crowds showing up for a novelty sandwich stick around for a second and third visit.
Coming Home to Paseo Boricua
They did. In 2025, Irizarry and Matulac built out a permanent storefront on Paseo Boricua, in a former Guerrero's Tacos & Pizza space. The move put the idea — a jibarito reimagined as a smash burger, with plantain standing in for the bun entirely — on the same blocks where the original sandwich was invented in the first place. The flagship order, the "Aye El Amor," carries a 4.8-star rating.
It's a small building with limited seating and no public restroom on site, the kind of practical detail that matters more than it sounds like it should when you're planning a visit. It's also, unmistakably, exactly where this idea belongs: a reinvention of a Chicago Puerto Rican classic, opened by people young enough to have found their inspiration on Instagram, sitting a few blocks from the restaurant that made the original.
Worth knowing: Seating is limited and there's no public restroom on site — plan this as a stop, not a sit-down meal with a group.
This is the first entry in Stories — the founders and neighborhoods behind Chicago's food scene. Know a founder story or a piece of neighborhood history worth telling?
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