A Dominican Legend Known for Her Fried Chicken Rises Once More

At around noon on a Friday, chef and owner Miriam Montes de Oca hurried out of her restaurant, Morena’s Kitchen, and headed to Rush Medical Center. Her 26-year-old daughter, Tatiana, was giving birth to Montes de Oca’s second granddaughter, Hailey. “I ran to the hospital because Tatiana was supposed to have the baby quickly, but [Hailey] didn’t come until the next day at 8 o’clock in the morning,” she says.

Hailey’s arrival coincided with the revival of Morena’s, as Montes de Oca had recently reopened the restaurant at a new location, 3758 W. North Avenue in Humboldt Park. She shut down the original restaurant — located about three miles west in Belmont Cragin at 5054 W. Armitage Avenue — three years ago.

Welcoming a new granddaughter while restarting her business has been a whirlwind for Montes de Oca, but she’s enjoying the journey. Before the closure, for five years, Morena’s Kitchen served Dominican staples like sancocho, oxtail, and red snapper — and Montes de Oca’s famous Dominican fried chicken.

The spice blend for that chicken hasn’t changed, and Montes de Oca guards the recipe with absolute secrecy. Diners can also taste that it’s been cleaned in the Caribbean way, with citrus or vinegar. Heated online debates over whether you should wash meat — the CDC says no, almost everyone with melanin says yes — fail to realize that most Caribbean, Asian, and African meat-washing techniques serve mainly as a brine to remove the gamy taste meat can often have, giving the dish a clarity of flavor, which Morena’s chicken — and their oxtail and lengua — have. “That fried chicken can’t go nowhere,” Montes de Oca laughs. “People love it the most.”

Montes de Oca closed her restaurant in January 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was a hard time. There was not enough money coming in, so I preferred to close down before it was too late for me,” she says.

She took a job with United Airlines at O’Hare International Airport to pay bills. With the extra time not running a restaurant, she was able to help Tatiana with her 2-year-old daughter, Catalina. Free airplane tickets also allowed Montes de Oca to go back to the Dominican Republic three to four times a year after not having been home for nearly two decades. “I was without my country for 16 years,” she says. “And when I closed the restaurant, I went back and I fell in love with my country again.”

Montes de Oca got the opportunity to reopen Morena’s when Vladimir Rodriguez, the owner of a Mexican bar and restaurant called La Leña, found he could no longer handle the expenses. He offered the restaurant space to Montes de Oca, and she didn’t hesitate. Rodriguez kept the bar half of the space, connected to Morena’s through a sliding door that’s usually open with customers easily moving through both businesses. The partnership has been good. “We work together,” Montes de Oca says. “The clients that drink over there, they ask for my food. And when people finish eating here, they say, ‘Oh you got a bar next door?’ and I tell them to go ahead and take a look.”

Still, when customers search Morena’s by name online, the old location still pops up instead of the new North Avenue location and La Leña comes up when searching by address. “I need to change it,” Montes de Oca says. “Everybody is confused. They ask me, ‘Are you La Leña’s, are you Morena’s? Are you Mexican, are you Dominican?’”

The best way to find the address, hours, and special announcements is through Facebook and Instagram — Morena’s regulars will find the menu unchanged, with a notable new section. Although firmly a Dominican restaurant, Montes de Oca retained some Mexican holdovers from La Leña’s menu like tortas, tacos, burritos, and chilaquiles. She notes that keeping the items helps La Leña’s old diners with the transition, but they also sell extremely well because she offers less commonly served meats like tripe and lengua.

Business has been good overall, with some ebbs and flows, Montes de Oca says. “To be out of the business for almost three years? I can’t complain.”

Many of Morena’s customers have transitioned to the new location seamlessly, either through word of mouth, Facebook posts, or walking by and doing a double take when they see the old sign. “Three days ago, one customer came and said ‘More, I thought somebody stole your name!’ I was like, ‘No, it’s me, I’m here. I’m back in business.’”

On weekends, Montes de Oca serves Dominican dishes like chivo guisado and rabo guisado (Dominican-style braised goat and oxtail). It can be hard to source specifically Dominican ingredients — especially Dominican oregano, which has a stronger flavor — but Montes de Oca gets many ingredients from a Dominican Chicagoan who brings it back from trips to New York. The restaurant also stocks traditional Dominican sodas, like the brand Country Club, in addition to more familiar brands like Mexican Jarritos.

Other options included mondongo, or tripe stew, and sancocho, a Latin American meat and vegetable stew widely thought to have roots in the Afro Latino community, whose ancestors were forcibly brought to the Caribbean, South and Central America by Spanish enslavers. Montes de Oca is Afro Latina, hence the name of the restaurant and Montes de Oca’s nickname, More. Morena means “dark-skinned” in Spanish, often referring to Latinas of African descent. As for the nickname, Montes de Oca says it’s a positive thing, although many people ask whether it bothers her. “I say no. It’s sweet, not the bad way. And it’s true. I am Morena, and it’s my nickname in the Dominican Republic, too.”

One of the more distinctive Dominican staples available at the restaurant every day are los tres golpes, meaning “the three hits” in Dominican Spanish — fried Dominican salami, fried eggs, and some fried cheese. Montes de Oca eats it with mangú, a cousin of Puerto Rican mofongo made from boiled plantain that she squishes like mashed potatoes.

Montes de Oca tops tres golpes with a savory onion gravy cooked in oil and vinegar. The rotisserie chicken — which fans of Peruvian pollo a la brasa will find familiar. Served with plain white rice, it’s her oldest granddaughter Catalina’s favorite meal.

Morena’s presence on the Chicago food scene is a relief for Dominicans in the city and surrounding suburbs since there isn’t much Dominican — or Caribbean — food in Chicago. Puerto Rican restaurants abound due to the large community here, but if you’re of Virgin Islander and Trinidadian descent like me, Guyanese, Bahamian, Haitian, or Dominican, the options get fewer and fewer. The Caribbean still maintains a presence on the dining scene in Chicago; Cafe Trinidad, 14 Parish, and Garifuna Flava are all great places.

Montes de Oca says one of her customers recently came in and excitedly told her about a Haitian restaurant near O’Hare, called Kizin Creole. “I told him, ‘For real, they got Haitian food?’ And I want to go try it because when I’m not here, I want to try something different. I like to go out with my kids and eat different foods and support other businesses because right now we need to help each other.”

Chicago lacks the abundance of choice diners might find in cities like New York, Miami, or Toronto, where clusters of Caribbean restaurants are within walking distance of each other. Montes de Oca says she would love for the options to diversify for Caribbean diners in Chicago and fans of our food, and she sees herself as part of that push.

Montes de Oca, who has lived in Chicago for 27 years, says she sees that changing in the coming years as New York, home to one of the country’s biggest Dominican communities, gets increasingly expensive. “Lots of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are coming [to Chicago] from New York now. I have family in who are like ‘I can’t afford the city anymore, I’ve got to go.’”

Even though the Dominican community here in Chicago is small, Montes de Oca says they find a home with many of the Puerto Ricans in the city, both being from Spanish-speaking Caribbean countries, with African, Indigenous, and European influences, as well as other bursts of migration from South and East Asia and the Middle East. “We’re brothers and sisters. We eat the same thing with different names,” Montes de Oca says. For example, she’s happy to make jibaritos — a sandwich of meat in between huge slices of smashed and fried plantains — for her Puerto Rican customers, who represent a large portion of her customer base. Jibaritos are one of those Chicago staples that have become famous because of the Puerto Rican community here. But, it’s also a Dominican food — Montes de Oca says they call it patacón.

In some ways, Montes de Oca feels her new location is a seamless transition. In other ways, she feels like she’s starting over from scratch. Food costs were a particular shock, and she’s learning how to deal with inflation.

“When I went to the grocery store [three years ago], my plantain was like $35. Now it’s $47,” she says. “My oil was $19. Now it’s $30.”

Morena’s stays open much longer — until midnight most days, and 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday — than most restaurants in the city. That’s despite restaurants rolling back hours during the pandemic due to labor and decreased business. At Morena’s, the longer hours are also an attempt to enliven the Caribbean dining scene here in Chicago.

Chicago’s restrictions don’t support street or late-night food culture, between infrastructure that’s hostile to walkers and those who take public transit, cultural differences that encourage fast eating, and lowered profits coupled with rising food costs. But Montes de Oca is giving it a go.

“I need to make this happen, and my people are happy with that because they say, after 7 o’clock, you don’t find any Caribbean food open,” she says. “You can’t find food from us.”

Morena’s Kitchen, 3758 W. North Avenue