On any given day, you can walk into Punta Cana Restaurant on Ridge Road in Irondequoit and run into a fair number of manager Luis Chavez' relatives. Chavez himself is likely to be somewhere near the entrance if he's not back in the kitchen breaking down sides of pork for the restaurant's transcendent chicharron. His wife, Geraldine, is likely holding down the front of the house, tending to the buffet, or making one of the half-dozen fresh juice drinks for which the restaurant should be famous. Chavez' mother-in-law, Maria Cabrera, and his mother, Julia Santiago, are both back in the kitchen whipping up family recipes for a fast-growing number of appreciative customers. His father-in-law, Juan Cabrera, comes in a couple times a week to make 10 or so pounds of fat links of garlicky sausage. After school, you might even run into Chavez' kids, quietly doing homework or helping out wherever they can.

Punta Cana is a family business in the very best sense of that term, and the pride that both the Chavez and Cabrera sides of the family put into their work is evident in everything they do.

If you are at all familiar with Dominican food, most of what you will see at Punta Cana will be familiar. Not far from the front door, there is a massive steam table from which diners can choose one starch, one meat, and a side (usually a vegetable or a salad) for $5.99 at lunchtime. On the way to the steam table, though, you'll notice that Punta Cana is more polished than other Dominican joints in town. There are cute, handmade floral table cloths, candles on the tables, original oil paintings done by high-school students in the Dominican Republic, and even floral arrangements and artfully twisted scarves in the front window. And, even more surprising to someone who is accustomed to picking from a fairly limited selection at such restaurants, at Punta Cana there is an extensive menu full of wonderful surprises.

Everything on the steam table looks appealing, but there's nothing that will immediately grab your attention. You'll see Dominican standards, including deep-brown chicken stew, steak covered in a bright red sauce, Flintstone-sized pork ribs fried to a deep mahogany brown, both fried and mashed plantains, white and yellow rice (the latter studded with red beans), a mixed salad, and a hot vegetable (tiny okra pods sauteed with onion and spicy red pepper made a recent and noteworthy appearance).

You might think you're in for a run-of-the-mill Dominican meal - until you pick up your first forkful of chicken stew and smell the complex array of aromas coming off the tender meat. That first bite will change your mind. Like the brown stews served at other Dominican restaurants, Punta Cana's version starts with rough cuts of chicken and brown sugar, the former seared before cooking and the latter turned into a caramel built on the rendered juice from the chicken that gives the dish its distinctive brown color. Where Geraldine Chavez' recipe departs from the normal is her use of white wine to deglaze the pan before the stock is added. The wine not only adds a depth to the gravy, it also moderates the sweetness of the sauce, allowing the oregano, garlic, and black pepper to shine through.

Whether ordered off the menu or from the buffet, the stew, sides, and a massive plate of starch - I highly recommend the yellow rice and beans, although the mashed plantains are equally good with a couple shots of hot sauce to liven them up - are all served separately, making it easy to share food around the table. The only downside of this very convivial way of eating is that it makes my natural inclination to upend my half-empty plate of chicken stew over the rice so that none of the gravy escapes look a bit unseemly in a crowded dining room.

The chicken stew isn't the only dish on the menu that might inspire eyebrow-raising behavior in Punta Cana's dining room. Picture, if you will, a chunk of tender roast pork, juicy and fragrant, begging to be eaten. Now, wrap it up in crisp fried bacon. This, dear reader, is chicharron ($6.99), and it is something of a specialty at Punta Cana, where Luis Chavez has refined what is essentially fried pork skin into a high art form.

Sweet and salty with a meaty undertone, the dish's flavors light up your tongue, but the textures are nothing short of sublime. The crunch of candy-hard skin, the velvety smoothness of lovingly rendered fat, and the sturdy meatiness of roasted pork are all delightful separately, but taken together they're not far short of pork nirvana. I found myself dissecting each piece to enjoy the flavors and textures separately, and then putting them back together again like meat Legos to see how each element complemented the others.

Nothing could compare to the simple goodness of chicharron, but the bistec enchilado (steak in sauce, $9.99) does put up a good fight. Thin slices of sirloin steak, seared and then simmered in a tomato- and onion-based sauce, are surprisingly tender but not falling apart the way a pot roast would in the same situation. The sauce itself is not unlike an Italian red sauce, although it has more onion and a lot more oregano and garlic than its Italian counterpart, making it perfect for pretty much anything, particularly for mashed plantains.

It's become very fashionable in trendy restaurants for chefs to make their own sausage, but most of them make only loose sausage, serving it as patties or as a crumbled complement to other dishes. Juan Cabrera takes the extra step, stuffing his mixture of hand-ground pork, onions, garlic, oregano, and lime juice into natural sausage casings. The resulting plump links are perfect for frying, the skin crisping up and the meat erupting from either end of the casing - a triumph of the sausage-maker's art and a damn good meal (longaniza, $9.99).

To find Punta Cana in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

Punta Cana Restaurant

1930 East Ridge Road | 730-5065

Sun-Thu 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Fri-Sat 11 a.m.-11 p.m.