Half a World Away, the Beriés are Big on TV

By Zoraida Diaz

Hans Valentin Berié and his wife Betty are television celebrity stars, back in Germany.

Last Sunday, the TV series Mein neues Leben XXL (My New Life), profiled one of the few and intermittent success stories on the show: an immigrant pair who left Germany with but a dream, and found it. In Guanacaste.

The wildly successful reality show is a voyeuristic incursion into the lives of some of the 150,000 Germans who emigrate each year to find a new life, often with disastrous results.

There’s man who ends up in New Zealand, and decides to start a sausage factory in his run-down rental after a butcher friend back home gives him a few phone tips, or the family that sell their house in Germany to emigrate to Vancouver Island on a tourist visa, because a car salesman promised the father a job…

“The show was still airing, and we received a phone call from a cook in Germany who wanted to come and work with us,” said Betty, big blue eyes wide open in disbelief.

But the Beriés’ story is different: the success story being dangled before the German caller has been years in the making. Sixteen years to be precise, ever since Hans drove down from Miami, through Texas and Mexico in an eight-year-old V8 Buick station wagon and decided to build a small empire on the strength of the piece of paper he had in his luggage: a master baker’s certificate.

Hans, Master German Baker, and—much later—his wife Betty, set up the most successful bakery in the North Pacific—providing over 100 different products to supermarkets up and down the coast, a gargantuan task that has Hans’ small fleet of trucks driving 4000 kms (2500 miles) weekly, and the Beriés working 14 to 18 hours a day.

© Zoraida Diaz

The unbroken rhythm sustained by Hans’ passion for the wood oven underwent a subtle transformation last year, when the same oven that spewed fragrant pastries, turned its magic to pizza, and then went further: a full fledged restaurant in Liberia, a city not know for its cuisine.

When, they took over the aptly named Jauja, the word alluding to a Peruvian valley of splendor (yet another paradise), the decades-old Liberia restaurant had seen a succession of wanderers at its helm, but none with the Beriés Teutonic tenacity.

Under the Beriés, Jauja has become one of Liberia’s few culinary musts—for the quality of the fare and for its affordable prices.

The food is beautifully prepared by cooks with Four Seasons experience: artfully conceived appetizers like the Caprese salad with thick cuts of fresh mozzarella, and garnished with a basil pesto, or the beef Carpaccio, perfect with its paper-thin slices of fresh parmesan and sprinkled with capers; and mouth-watering entrees like the lomito gorgonzola seared on the outside and perfectly red at its heart and smothered in a creamy, but light béchamel-based Gorgonzola sauce…

And of course, there is the pizza.

Hans has the secret weapon for what may be the best pizza in town, in Mario Espinoza (above), 39, a Liberia native and pizza maker for a quarter of a century.

“I learned from an Italian named Renzo in San José,” recounts Mario, eagerly offering up his secret for the perfect pizza.

© Zoraida Diaz

“It’s the wood oven,” he says.

“We still put in 16 hours a day, but we can’t stop,” says Hans with a big grin, although he admits he would like to spend more time with his children, Daniel (6), Beniamin (3), and Sofie (18 months), in his 20-hectare farm in Curubandé, which borders the Rincón de la Vieja National Park.

The closing scene of “My life abroad” shows the Beriés giving one mother of a party on the beach in Hermosa, where they celebrate their life, their bakery and their restaurant with the friends they have made over the years in Costa Rica.

This may have been the moment when one German man, called Costa Rica looking for the life he saw on his TV screen — the one where a family frolicked in the surf, as the sun receded, tinting the sky orange.

He, too, wanted to find his Jauja.

(Open Monday through Saturday, 7am to 11pm. Sundays, 11am to 11pm. 2665-2601/02. Jauja will not close over the holidays, not once.)