By Prior Beharry
POPULAR Port of Spain restaurateur Pancho Yarna has died.
He passed away on Monday, his 72nd birthday, his son Kevin told AZP News.
Pancho, whose wife died some years ago, is survived by his three children and three grandchildren.
His business, Pancho’s Bar and Restaurant on Edward Street, was very popular, serving Indian, Creole and other dishes for breakfast and lunch.
Politicians, businessmen, attorneys, doctors, public servants and journalists were regulars at Pancho’s, even when the restaurant was previously located on Queen Street.
Kevin said his father started working for a Chinese food outlet in 1976 and moved to Edward Street after buying the property in 2014.
His brothers and his son Curtis also have popular food establishments in Port of Spain.
In 2013, his Chinese-style chicken was featured in the New York Times. The article stated: “This weekend’s meal takes us to the bottom corner of Port of Spain, in Trinidad, where Kevin Yarna and his father, Pancho, spend Fridays serving Chinese-style chicken at Pancho’s Snackette, near the modern rise of the National Library. Chinese-style chicken is a dish you can find all over Trinidad and within the diaspora that has followed the nation’s emergence from British rule. The skin is fried into a lacquered mahogany. The meat beneath it tastes of five-spice, ginger and soy and is generally accompanied by a hum of oyster sauce mixed with the zing of the pickled Scotch-bonnet-pepper sauce that is seemingly omnipresent on the island’s tables.”
In 2014, while he was standing outside his food outlet on Queen Street, Yarna was shot in the abdomen. He was wounded by a stray bullet that ruptured his large intestine, lacerated his pancreas and lodged deep in his liver. He lived with a piece of the bullet in his liver.
He spent weeks at the Port of Spain General Hospital (POSGH) and was back at work months later.
His son said he died at the POSGH around 12.30 pm on Monday from a number of complications, including low blood count, after having spinal surgery a few weeks ago.
