LYNN — The most popular menu item at PapiVivi, a new restaurant on Boston Street, is Vivi’s Tripleta, a three-meat Puerto Rican street sandwich with roasted pork shoulder, ground beef, and chicken breast marinated in sofrito, pressed in fresh bread with and topped with mayonnaise, ketchup, garlic, cilantro, potato sticks, and a signature PapiVivi sauce.
“It’s just packed with flavor, especially with the garlic, cilantro and onion — it just comes out at you,” said the owner Sam Cortiella. “Everything is done fresh, and done with love.”
The restaurant began in 2015 as a project between Cortiella and his daughter Vivi, who was only in second grade at the time, and is a tribute to the Puerto Rican cuisine that is a part of their shared culture.
“Me and my daughter wanted to start something that was different than sports,” said Cortiella, a long-time athlete who played junior college baseball in Texas. “My daughter and I love to eat food of our family, so we thought, let’s do something together.”
The pair, who lived in New York City at the time, started cooking together and handing out free sandwiches.
“The feedback was amazing, so I said, let’s see what we can do with this,” said Cortiella.
They began selling their food at street festivals in New York, and were able to open the small restaurant in Lynn last year.
“It’s hard enough to open up a small business already, let alone during the pandemic,” said Cortiella, who struggled to open the restaurant due to restrictions related to the virus. “We were lucky to hit the ground running and it took off from there.”
Opening the restaurant was a surprise change of course for Cortiella, who had never worked in a restaurant or owned a business before PapiVivi.
“The closest I ever came was taking a culinary class in high school,” he said. “I was so focused on athletics. I never thought this would be my path, but it’s my path. I took a shot and it’s been working out.”
Prior to opening PapiVivi, Cortiella worked as a guidance counselor at a school in Brooklyn. He uses the skills he learned as an educator to run his restaurant, building a positive culture among his staff of three employees.
Vivi still lives in New York, but helps at the restaurant whenever she visits.
While Cortiella didn’t have experience working in restaurants before he began, he does know Puerto Rican cuisine. His family is Puerto Rican, and growing up he used to visit his grandparents in Puerto Rico every summer.
“Many of my recipes come from my grandmother and my daughter’s mom’s mother,” he said. “We really wanted to represent my family’s culture. I think it’s really important to know where you came from. Because knowing where you’re from builds confidence, that’s what I told my kids when I was a guidance counselor. We wanted to show the beauty and traditions of our culture.”
When he used to visit, back in the 1980s and ’90s Tripleta wasn’t a popular meal in Puerto Rico. It only blew up more recently.
“It started from the food trucks in Puerto Rico, and now we’re bringing it to Boston with our own flair on it,” said Cortiella.
Despite the fact that he is a recent arrival to the area, Cortiella has already fallen in love with the North Shore.
“I love the North Shore, I love the energy, the diversity,” he said. “It’s just a beautiful part of Massachusetts, from the people to the landscape.”
Guthrie Scrimgeour can be reached at [email protected].
