Mi Vida Cafe & Burgers - Palmer, Puerto Rico

After the morning spent driving and hiking in El Yunque National Forest, we were hungry. We were driving through the small town of Palmer, Puerto Rico and Judy Yelped the best restaurant in town - it was Mi Vida Cafe & Burgers, a cheery looking place with a bright orange paint job on the outside and lots of little signs scattered around advertising it. 

We started by sharing a frappe made of strawberry and mango. It was cold and quite strongly flavored, a very nice starter for a meal following a hike. 

I ordered a wrap which included fried grouper, cheese, lettuce and pico de gallo. It came with French fries which were really large home-made slices of potato which were more like potato chips. It was all very good, but what made it excellent was a side bottle with a white sauce that consisted, at least partly, of mayonnaise and lots of garlic. The garlic was very strong and I couldn't get enough of it. I doused every bite of wrap in a stream of the garlic sauce, which had a bit of a garlic bite to it. I think I single handedly put down a good portion of a squeeze bottle of the stuff. The grouper was excellent in a wrap and I think anything would have been improved by the garlic/mayo sauce. 

As good as my order was, Judy got the real winner, a hamburger with jalapenos, rellenos, Swiss cheese, red onion, pickles, lettuce and mofongo, a mixture of mashed green plantains and other ingredients. This burger was amazing, cooked perfectly, still very juicy, and the mofongo gave a very different texture and taste. I liked it much more than the mofongo which we had at El Kampestre. 

The only thing that dampened our enthusiasm for Mi Vida was the long, long wait, something that we encountered at other eateries in Puerto Rico. When you only have so much time in a place, these long meals just suck up huge chunks of valuable time when you'd like to be doing something else. We chalked it up to island time, but it was maddening. I think we were there about two hours. Other than that, I would say this was a great find.