As Hispanic Heritage Month comes to a close, a Long Island Latina's mission to celebrate Hispanic heritage all year long continues.

Since January, Elisa Irvolino has made it her mission to travel across Long Island celebrating Latino-owned businesses and highlighting the different cultures of Latin American countries.

"With Latinos, food is like our love language,” she said. "Right away, people will say places in the city, Brooklyn, Queens. And I'm like, 'No! We have these places right here on Long Island!’ Just people don't know about them."

With each stop, she's learning new recipes from Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica and Ecuador. For Hispanic Heritage Month, she's getting a taste of the Dominican Republic.

Massiel Medina is one of the co-owners at Casita RD in Baldwin. She says they wanted to create an at-home feel that is reminiscent of a family member’s home in the Dominican Republic.

"You go into the Dominican Republic, just to give you an example, and you want to go visit family, you cannot leave that home without having food, having coffee, because if you leave, it's like a big disrespect," she said.

With that in mind, co-owner and chef Stephen Rodriguez says Casita RD serves as a place for people from the community to gather and try items off their menu that fuses traditional Dominican recipes with other cuisines. 

"At the end of the day, we might speak different languages, we might look different, but we all value the same thing,” he said. “It's really just about creating more spaces for people to come together."

Irvolino says her hope is for Latinos to celebrate their ancestors through the recipes they passed down.

"Make sure that as they grow up, they're passing it down to future generations,” she said. “I feel that we owe that to our past generations."

Irvolino says hopes to create a cookbook filled with a recipes from each Latin American restaurant she visits on Long Island.