Being a self-proclaimed food anthropologist is mostly great, but sometimes it can make you feel like a schmuck. As it did, for a couple of reasons, the other day when I visited the Salvadorean Bakery, a small, plain restaurant at an uncharismatic intersection in White Center.
The first reason is because instead of ordering what sounded good to me, I ordered the most exotic thing I could find on the menu. It’s my job, I figured, not to participate in any kind of gastronomical Babbittry. But you shouldn’t make a fetish of it, which is what led me to a big plate of fried yucca, topped with some pieces of pork that had been fried within an inch of their little pork lives ($6.50). The fried yucca is like a big, sweet French fry, and the dish is served (as are many dishes here) with a side dish of curtido, a delicious pickled cabbage concoction–briny, spicy, lively–that falls somewhere between salsa and kimchi. But the dish was heavy and sleepy-making, and the pork bits were very very hard and salty.
Undaunted, I continued to eat. I ordered a pupusa, which is a chewy, rather thick tortilla split and stuffed with cheese and (in my case) loroco, an edible palm blossom ($1.75 each, and they also come with other fillings). This is less like a taco than like a quesadilla–the loroco chopped into the salty cheese, tiny sparky bites of something not unlike an artichoke heart–altogether quite decadent and delicious, topped with curtido and a few squirts of hot sauce. I looked around at my fellow diners, who had all ordered multiple pupusas. Why had it not occurred to me to look at what the regulars were eating?
I also ate some silken chicken soup (small $3.95, served with tortillas and fresh jalapeños), and took home a selection of pastries (50 cents-$1.10), also very good–especially an empanada de guayaba, guava jam enclosed in dense, eggy pastry.
But the thing that made me feel like a real asshole, there in a restaurant filled with Hispanic people having lunch after church, was another white guy pontificating (earnestly, pedantically) about the similarities and differences between food cultures to his bored-looking Hispanic girlfriend. Which made me realize that it’s fine to be the one daring gringo on food safari–but when another shows up, game over.
Salvadorean Bakery
1719 SW Roxbury St (White Center), 762-4064.