Su Casa Is the Newest Restaurant at Dorado Beach. Its Name Is the Oldest Thing on the Property.

At Dorado Beach, the name Su Casa has already belonged to a pilot's beachfront house and to a clubhouse kitchen where a young apprentice learned the trade. Today it belongs to a dinner room at La Hacienda Clubhouse, which the resort calls its newest fine-dining experience. That apprentice, Mario Pagán, is the chef behind it.

The resort describes Su Casa as a "Caribbean-Eastern" concept. Read the dinner menu line by line, though, and most of the plates are anchored in Puerto Rican cooking, with the Eastern part supplied by technique. That's the point of the room, and it explains the name.

Three Su Casas, One Line of Descent

Before Su Casa was a restaurant, it was a house. The resort's own history says Alfred T. Livingston bought 1,700 acres on the north coast in 1905 to grow coconuts and grapefruit. His daughter Clara went on to manage the property and built herself a residence she called "Su Casa." Clara Livingston was the 200th licensed female pilot in the world. According to Dorado Beach's history page, she built a private landing strip on the property, and Amelia Earhart stayed at Su Casa before her last attempt to fly around the world. Laurance Rockefeller arrived in 1955, bonded with Livingston over aviation, and opened Dorado Beach Resort to the public on December 1, 1958.

Here is how the name has moved around the property since then:

• The house. Livingston's 1920s Spanish-style hacienda sits on the beach at the eastern end of the property. Luxury Travel Advisor reported in May 2019 that the Ritz-Carlton Reserve had finished redesigning it as an 8,000-square-foot, five-bedroom villa. The original architecture and foundation stayed in place, Champalimaud supplied custom pieces, and Sophia Maldonado painted murals. Marriott's October 2018 reopening release had said the villa would welcome guests starting in mid-December 2018.
• The first restaurant. A 2017 Dorado Beach post on Panela records that Mario Pagán, years earlier, "was mentored by renowned Chef Alfredo Ayala at 'Su Casa' restaurant in the original clubhouse here at Dorado Beach." That restaurant was in the clubhouse, a different building from Livingston's house.
• The current restaurant. The resort's Su Casa page describes the room as "reimagined by Chef Mario Pagán, who began his culinary journey as a young apprentice in the original Su Casa."

When El Nuevo Día profiled Pagán in May 2023, it listed the five resort restaurants he oversaw as culinary director: Melao by Mario Pagán, Encanto Beach Bar & Grill, Panela, Barlovento and Watermill Café. Su Casa wasn't one of the five. Today the clubhouse lists Su Casa as its newest fine-dining room. The property's oldest name is on a restaurant again, and the chef who reimagined it learned to cook in the original.

Read the Menu for the Puerto Rican Anchor

"Caribbean-Eastern" sounds like fusion cooking that could open in any resort town. The Su Casa dinner menu is more specific than that. The small plates run from $12 to $34, and in most of them the Asian format carries a Puerto Rican ingredient.

The same pattern continues further down the menu. The larger plates include a dorada miso black cod, shiitake sesame lobster served with ube yuca mofongo, and an oxtail fried-rice "pegaíto." Mofongo and pegao, the crisp rice from the bottom of the pot, are two of the most familiar textures in island cooking. Here they come in roles a sushi bar or a Cantonese kitchen would recognize.

A few plates sit outside the pattern, such as the Kani Crab Spring Rolls with mango papaya mint gastrique at $16, the Fried Chicken Karaage at $26 and the Oregano Edamame at $12. They're the exceptions, though. For a table ordering several plates to share, the pegao, sofrito and guava dishes are where Su Casa reads most clearly as Pagán's.

Two Pagán Rooms Under One Clubhouse Roof

Su Casa has a casual sibling. La Hacienda Clubhouse runs what the resort calls dual dining concepts, both led by Pagán. Panela is the casual, social room, and Su Casa is described as the newest fine-dining experience. The two rooms keep very different hours:

• Panela: 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, casual dress.
• Su Casa: 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, refined resort attire.

So for two nights a week the clubhouse has only one Pagán kitchen open. On Mondays and Tuesdays the evening menu is Panela's. On the other five nights, the choice is between a casual table and a dressed-up one in the same building.

Two practical details follow. First, the days listed vary by page. The resort's dining directory says Wednesday through Sunday, but this month's event listing gives Su Casa's service as Wednesday through Saturday. Calling 787-626-1039 before a Sunday reservation will settle it. Second, access is limited. The resort calendar says Su Casa dining is exclusive to members and resort guests, and a member's guests must be accompanied by the member at all times.

The Formats That Run Through This Room

Beyond the regular menu, Su Casa runs special-format nights, and several of them build on the same idea of a resort kitchen with island roots.

1. Mario & Friends. Pagán invites a guest chef for a one-night collaboration. Last week's edition, on October 23, brought in Chef Sebastián Rosado of LEVANT. La Concha's LEVANT page describes the restaurant as Mediterranean-inspired, by Chef Michael White. It identifies Rosado as Puerto Rico-born, trained at Escuela Hotelera de San Juan and the Culinary Institute of America, with kitchen time at Nobu, Le Bernardin and Spago before he came home. That dinner was priced at $240 a person, or $280 with a curated wine pairing, with tax and service charge extra, a 48-hour cancellation policy and limited seats. It shows the price range the next edition is likely to fall in, though the resort calendar doesn't list one yet.
2. Tomahawk & Whisky. This runs through Saturday, October 31: a $149 tomahawk paired with Japanese whisky or a handcrafted cocktail, 6 to 10 p.m. during Su Casa's Wednesday-to-Saturday hours. Reservations are required. As this post goes live on Thursday, three nights remain.
3. Jazz Nights at Su Casa. Live jazz alongside the Carib-Asian menu, Friday, October 30, at 7 p.m. Tables are booked through the OpenTable link on the resort calendar. For more information, Su Casa can be reached at 787-626-1039 or [email protected].

Once Tomahawk & Whisky wraps on Saturday, the resort calendar has no other dated Su Casa events. The December listings are clubwide: The Great Christmas Caravan on December 4, with a golf-cart parade and a Santa meet-and-greet, the Members' Christmas Party on December 10, and a New Year's Eve Celebration, all marked "more details coming soon." Anyone who wants the next guest-chef night should watch the Dorado Beach events calendar through November.

The restaurant at La Hacienda Clubhouse is in a different place from Livingston's house on the eastern beach. They share a name, and over the years they have shared the people who passed through them, but a dinner reservation at Su Casa means a table at the clubhouse.

Su Casa's history is one of the stories I like most to tell on this property, and much of it happened within a short cart ride of La Hacienda Clubhouse. If an evening there has you thinking about a residence close to the clubhouse, or about turning a resort home into a furnished rental, I'm happy to walk you through what's available and how ownership works here. Reach out to MMO Realty and Get Access To My Private Listings.