El Patio Colombiano

DCS “perks up” and finally makes it to Colombia in October…

Andale! Andale! Arepa! Arepa!

The juxtapositions of Long Island past vs. present are many, some sensible, some… curious. A long-gone Sears and Lord & Taylor now seamlessly blend into the streets of Garden City as medical facilities and office buildings, fulfilling the needs of a changing suburbia. Nassau Coliseum, the former “Fort Neverlose”, once a dump but our dump, got a glow up, but now sits mostly empty in an even emptier and oft fought-over parking lot in Uniondale.

Out of vestiges of what’s dead and dying often springs kernels of the new, a sort of physical metaphor for a changing Long Island, which leads us to our October’s host. Massapequa’s Sunrise Mall, once a center of  suburbanization, now sits deserted and hulking, a decaying symbol of a lifestyle once relevant but no longer. But look closer at the area, just across the highway, and you’ll notice what such centers helped to birth; a restaurant, an ethnic one, and not the Italian-American or American-Chinese kind that initially catered to our growing populace, but a more obscure one, the kind that can only appear once that populace is already rooted, as if Queens and its global cuisine were checking in us, waiting for the right time to spring its bounty east. New life sprouting in the wake of the old, but not just that, the liveliness, color, and vibrancy of a certain culture, Colombian.

It’s an area of the world that we’ve touched on before, South America and the Caribbean, but DCS has yet to hit Colombia, host of six different biomes and the only country in South America with a coast on both the Pacific and the Caribbean. Bringing us up close and personal to that boisterous and bountiful culture is El Patio Colombiana, opened in 2021 by brothers Fabrizio and Mario Zaino (themselves scions of Westbury’s Cafe Gino’s and owners of Glen Cove’s Jalisco, as well as Black Label Burgers of Westbury). With a simple but determined mission to “achieve the most authentic Colombian food possible”, the brothers Zaino look to put their own footprint on LI’s culinary landscape. 

So in October we stare in the face of a cold, dark relic of the past while dining inside the warm and colorful living symbol of our present.

Hope to see you in Colombia next month,