A Taste of South America: How Argentina Cuisine Came to Stone Harbor
By Jack Byrne
Natives of the Argentina port city of Buenos Aires are commonly known as porteños, or “people of the port.” Chef Lucas Manteca is a porteño himself, but when it came time to name his latest culinary venture, the name “El Porteño” felt too masculine for the James Beard Award nominated chef and his wife and business partner Deanna Ebner.
The name La Porteña, on the other hand, had a delicate feminine ring to it that set it apart from other steakhouses, which are dark and brooding. Manteca and Ebner designed La Porteña to be bright and inviting.
Opening in May 2025, La Porteña features a vibrant baby blue and white interior that not only matches the large Argentinian flag on the roof of the business, but also foreshadows the sensational flavors of South America that guests will indulge in.
La Porteña is a prix-fixe, or fixed-price, BYOB restaurant that serves predetermined multicourse meals, handpicked and personally prepared by Chef Lucas. Unlike conventional eating establishments, the menu at La Porteña is constantly changing, which gives guests a unique experience upon each visit.
“I get more excitement out of creating a new dish rather than cooking something that I already know,” Manteca says. “I get really bored about cooking things that I’ve already cooked. That’s why we change the menu so often. If we already did a dish for two weeks, it needs to go.”
As the tide ebbs and flows, so too does the taste of La Porteña. While complacency is Manteca’s enemy, one constant remains at his restaurant: serving a traditional Argentinian-style beef empanada as the first course of each meal.
La Porteña’s empanadas are filled with ground beef, onions, green onions, peppers, Thai chili, olives, hard-boiled egg, cumin, and paprika, and are cooked to a crispy, golden-brown color. After the empanada comes other small opening courses, with inspiration from both North and South America, ranging from Patagonian salpicon, Jersey asparagus, or whatever Chef Lucas decides to create that evening.
“I don’t have a favorite dish,” Manteca says. “It’s more about my favorite season that inspires me to create my favorite dish. I don’t work with recipes or copy dishes. Of course, you always grab ideas from already existing things, but I don’t like to copy recipes. I build my own.”
Guests can choose their main course from either the stove or wood-burning grill. While La Porteña has a selection of seafood such as their swordfish schnitzel and lobster fra diavolo, they are renowned for their premium cuts of steak which aren’t available at just any grocery store.
Chef Lucas and his team at La Porteña only serve the finest steaks on the market, with options including but not limited to picanha, flat iron, bavette, culette, petite sirloin, flank steak, tri-tip steak, and more.
“Most of our cuts are butcher cuts that people barely eat at home because it’s not available,” he says. “All the cuts of meat that we serve are incredible.”
Meals at La Porteña conclude with a dessert option which varies between dulce de leche rice pudding, strawberries with lemon soft cream, and others.
Some restaurants try to shuffle through as many customers as possible each night, but La Porteña takes a much more laid-back approach.
“It’s a sit down and bring a bunch of bottles of wine-type place,” Ebner says. “People stay for 2, 3 hours easily. After 6 o’clock, I don’t expect a table back. We really just do one turn here. It’s a calmer space as far as restaurants go, it has its moments of chaos, but for the most part, it’s very steady.”
The calm demeanor of La Porteña is likely thanks to Ebner’s thoughtful design. While she and Manteca created the restaurant together, Ebner personally designed the interior, filling the restaurant with nautical relics and a vintage charm not often found at Michelin star-level establishments.
“I’m a junkie for vintage-ness,” Ebner says. “My thoughts for the design tied into his thoughts for the food.”
Ebner’s vintage-junkie mentality is much more apparent at her and Manteca’s other restaurant, Quahog’s Seafood Shack and Bar. While guests dine on their favorite dishes such as the barbecue pacu fish ribs and Brazilian Moqueca stew, they’re immersed in a dining room full of trinkets and doodads collected over the years.
“All the tchotchke weirdness is ours,” Ebner says. “I have never said no to a tchotchke with Quahog’s. It’s totally ridiculous in there, from paint-by-number paintings, to a black-and-white photo of Farrah Fawcett on a longboard, to ceramic planter cats. Some people know the tchotchkes so well that they can spot the new things. It’s almost like a game to see what’s new each year because I’m always adding. It’s insane.”
Manteca and Ebner have been mainstays of the Cape May County dining scene for more than 20 years. The two have operated restaurants such as Sea Salt in Stone Harbor and the Red Store in Cape May Point, but their most successful business to date still remains Quahog’s, which has been in operation since 2008.
Though the Great Recession of 2008 forced Manteca and Ebner to close Sea Salt in 2009, a TV show appearance helped Quahog’s brave the storm.
Now entering its 20th season in business, Quahog’s was prominently featured on Food Network’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” in 2011. The episode titled “Funky Finds” skyrocketed the popularity of their New England and Argentina fusion seafood joint, which is still going strong to this day.
“We weren’t watching TV, so we had never heard of Guy Fieri before,” Ebner says. “Apparently everybody else knew him because there were like 200 people outside of the building trying to take a picture.”
One diehard fan of the show told them: “You are going to be so busy, you have no idea.”
“Then the show aired, and it just exploded,” Manteca says. “We had a line out of the door, it was insane.”
“We’re always still dealing with different issues, but day-by-day, we don’t have to be present at Quahog’s,” Manteca says. “We’re still there every day, but we are not personally running it for 14 hours a day.”
There’s a good reason for that. Their desire for a new challenge led them to open La Porteña, with Manteca and Ebner going back to the way they used to operate their old restaurant Sea Salt. Manteca cooks in the kitchen and Ebner hosts in the front of the house.
“He can have an opinion on the front of the house and share that, as I can have an opinion for his kitchen,” says Ebner. “He can take it or leave it, as can I. We’ve been doing it together for so long that neither of us even want to disagree anymore. Whoever’s got the strongest opinion on something should win that argument, period. Not even make it an argument to begin with.”
Together the cohesive unit has created the restaurant of their dreams.
“We built exactly what we wanted to build,” Manteca says. “We came up with this concept, it’s a wood fire grill, it’s a tasting menu, it has a flair. The main focus is on the quality of the product. I don’t care how much I pay for the product, we get the best product that is out there, and that’s what we serve.”
“The tasting concept helps because there’s no waste,” Ebner says. “He’s able to use that product and know exactly how many people will be dining with us. He’s got his dream kitchen and has all the toys he ever wanted now.”
Married for 25 years, Manteca and Ebner have now lived in Cape May County longer than anywhere else. The world-traveling surfing enthusiasts have worked together professionally throughout almost their entire adult lives, and Ebner wouldn’t have it any other way.
“He’s my bestie,” Ebner says. “It’s not like I’ve got somebody there who doesn’t know what I’m going through. It’s easy for us to be on the same page because we’re the managers here, so we can back each other up. We both usually quickly agree on things because we’ve run businesses the same way. We’ve formulated our ideas of what the businesses should look like, and then through the years, curated them the way we think they should look like, and here we are.”
As La Porteña enters its third year in business, Stone Harbor can count on Chef Lucas Manteca and Deanna Ebner to keep delivering one of the highest-caliber farm-to-table culinary adventures available anywhere on the Jersey Shore for years to come. La Porteña is located at 9426 Third Ave. It is open seasonally from 5-8:30pm, Saturday to Monday, and closed on Sundays.