Sajoma Latin Fusion

Your steak sizzles as it sits on a heated slab of Himalayan rock salt. As you watch, you sip an old fashioned cocktail made with the spiced Dominican spirit known as mamajuana. The cold drink washes the residue of teriyaki-glazed chicharrón off of your lips. The New York strip continues to cook, its robust flavor taking in a mineral quality from the pink salt. 

Welcome to Sajoma Latin Fusion, a Dominican restaurant that draws inspiration from far beyond the Caribbean. The upscale eatery is the brainchild of Pedro Rodriguez, an entrepreneur who grew up between the Dominican Republic and New York. Before opening Sajoma, Rodriguez owned a food distribution company and four restaurants in the Big Apple. On trips to visit family in Kissimmee, he saw an opportunity to delight the locals with a restaurant that combined the cuisine of the island with global flavors and New York service.

Waiters are prompt and knowledgeable, and they present food with a flourish: diners can watch in awe as their servers light sushi rolls on fire and drizzle béchamel over mounds of mofongo. The restaurant is expansive and sleek, with a wide bar, plush seats, and walls that turn purple at night.

But it’s more than a show. The food is very, very good. The restaurant gets its name from the Dominican municipality of San Jose de las Matas, Rodriguez’s hometown, a place famous for its beauty and mineral-rich waters, where residents live off the land. “Everything that we use is natural,” Rodriguez said. “Any Dominican, Hispanic plate that you’re eating here, it’s like if you’re home.”

Rodriguez hired multiple chefs who didn’t quite see his vision before bringing a Dominican chef, Marco Gonzalez, to the restaurant to create the menu.

Some dishes, like chivo liniero guisado, or goat stew, and paella caribeña with saffron rice, seafood, and sausage, are Dominican classics. The beloved meat-and-vegetable stew sancocho was a particular challenge. “It needed the taste, look, and texture [to be] like if actually your mom made it,” Rodriguez said. The dish was inconsistent until a year ago, when he brought a chef named Willie Fernandez, who runs a pasta truck in front of Findi cigar shop in Tampa, to teach the restaurant his version. Now, Dominican customers are so thrilled with this bowl of homestyle comfort that, after trying it, they often order an extra serving to go for their parents to try.

But what sets Sajoma apart is its willingness to experiment. Their chicharrón, or deep-fried pork belly, comes glazed in teriyaki sauce and perched upon mashed taro in one appetizer, and bathed in a ceviche of onion, cilantro, peppers, and lime in another. The restaurant’s current chef, who is Colombian, added his country’s parrillada, a feast of grilled meats that comes smoking to the table. In addition to their mamajuana old fashioned, Sajoma sports a number of delicious cocktails, including another old fashioned served with a caramelized sweet plantain that imparts its flavor to the drink while soaking up booze, making a delicious last bite.

On weekends, this lively experiment in globe-trotting Dominican eating turns into a party, with live music and DJs. And on Tuesdays, the restaurant hosts a cigar night, where customers can head to Sajoma’s leafy terrace and smoke custom-rolled cigars from Findi. He plans to release a line of cigars soon; yet another iteration of his brand of Dominican cool in Kissimmee.