Shaving a Trope

Trump Pokes His Head Into My Portuguese Fishing Village
I'm wandering through the holiday fair in downtown Setúbal and hear a brass band in the distance. As I get closer, I realize, to my horror, that they're playing "YMCA."

Are these guys MAGA? Has some vestige of Salazar-era authoritarianism arisen to align with the Trump cultural circus? Do these guys realize the current implications and associations of this song?

But then I recalled similar anomalies encountered in foreign lands. I keep endlessly relearning that transported tropes seldom retain context.

Hope You Fellas Enjoy the Watermelon
I've previously told the story of flying to Japan to perform with a (nearly) all-black big band, and the fat cat Japanese producer who paid for it all welcomed the band with a huge spread of fresh watermelon.

As my colleagues dug in nonchalantly (musicians on tour are like locusts; never knowing when you'll be fed again, you ask no questions), I parsed out the situation.

The producer genuinely respected us. He'd gone to great effort and expense to fly us over. He was certainly not looking to insult us.

Moreover, I knew that off-season watermelon in Japan costs $100 per melon (my bandmates would have choked if they'd known). So, again, this was not what it seemed. It was a gesture of respect, horribly bungled.

I finally understood that the situation was so simple that I'd failed to consider it: he'd heard somewhere that black people like watermelon. Not in any sneering way, but just as a data point. So he was being gracious. Like having frozen vodka ready for Russian visitors.

No other context was applicable. Just a data point he'd picked up from the ether (as we acquire most of the things we know). It took effort for me to shave off the layers of context and recognize the simplicity.

Jewy Jew Food
There's a Jewish restaurant in Krakow, Poland serving Jewish soul food cooked by gentiles in a restaurant festooned with the most vile caricatures of huge-nosed, money grubbing, grubby-bearded, well, Jews.

I didn't notice all at once. It was a slow burn as I tackled the greasy fare, peering around the room while chewing. My initial thought was: What exactly am I supporting here? Was this like striding into Auschwitz' gift shop circa 1944 to buy a commemorative "I took a shower!" yarmulka and lend support to the important work being done there?

Again, I pondered. The owners needed to brand; to convey that this was not Chinese or Italian or French food, but Jewish. So they sought out the most Jewish-seeming decor they could find. And, hoo boy, they'd found it! But there was no intention to offend; as with the Japanese producer, the whole enterprise was intended as respectful tribute. Not being Berkeley sociology grad students, they weren't trained in the art of tonal adjustment - e.g. the meticulous insertion of "sadly", "unfortunately", and "tragically" before all verbs - nor had they recognized the need to avoid cartoons of greedy, dirty rabbis. That's all!

Once again, shorn of context, a trope can be utterly without spin. The malignance is only in the interpretation.

Terrifying Nice Boys
Finally, back to Japan again. I was walking down the sidewalk as a gang of punks with mohawks and spikes and studs and crazy piercings approached with menacing expressions. My impulse was to dash to the other side of the street, but a tiny wizened grandma happened to be walking near me, and I paused to considered whether she was in danger.

She kept shuffling forward obliviously, a sweet smile on her face, having a nice walk on a lovely day. And, as they passed, the punks paused to bow with deep respect to their elder before recomposing themselves and moving on.

Even having left Kansas, you often must remind yourself you're not in Kansas anymore.

Back to the Band
The band was just playing the damned song. Yeah, it might have entered their playlist because they've been hearing it on the news, but they're not bringing political baggage along with it.

On my end, I might consider the musicians terribly naive, and figure they ought to pay closer attention to implications. Or, I might acknowledge that they're just nice guys playing a fun song everybody kinda likes, and the only problem in all of this is me clutching at my pearls.

I lean toward the latter interpretation.


This, btw, is why boredom is never appropriate. The tedious tediousness of existence is only at the surface. Travel widely or observe deeply, and there's lots more going on. Also: less!

The Worst of Times, The Best of Noodles...

“I saw this guy hitting himself in the head with a hammer. I asked, "Hey, buddy, why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?” Guy replied “Because it feels so good when I stop!”

       — First joke I learned as a kid


I spent a lot of 2023 either in bed or in hospital due to various health maladies. 2024 hasn't been much better, adding a shoulder meltdown (I'm walking around with a splint, like a Revolutionary War soldier). I'm currently on hold for comprehensive shoulder surgery, whose recovery involves months of unremitting childbirth-style pain. Final recovery in six months, best case. And then I have four other surgeries queued up, including the same on my other shoulder (which is 50% as bad and gaining fast). I don't normally complain (unless there's some insight to be shared in the process), but you'll see why in just a minute.

I recently observed that people in their late 50s and early 60s ought to consider spending a bit more. Plus I need a reward to look forward to during my recovery, to enjoy before I undergo the remaining surgeries. So I have a plan!

The opposite of Portugal is Malaysia (and, like many antitheses, they touch; there is a small remaining strain of Portuguese culture in Malaysia, including one tiny remaining settlement, though this Portuguese connection is not where I'm headed with this). I showed last week how the soul of Malaysian and Portuguese pasta resemble each other, but that was the most tenuous possible stretch. Really, if you want SEA noodles - or anything the least bit Chinese - you won't find anything of the sort here. I've had maybe three East or Southeast Asian meals in 18 months, all on trips outside Portugal, and have gone a bit gastronomically stir crazy, despite eating like a god every blessed meal here. What's more, I've been storing up Malaysian food tips for quite sometime via Google Maps chowhounding.

So here's the plan. Six months after surgery, I will fly to Kuala Lumpur and stay at Tian Jing Hotel, superbly located and reasonably priced in Chinatown, full of street food. I'm bad with jet lag, so I will fly on Etihad Airline, which offers free stopovers in Doha, taking a few days to acclimate and to finally eat in this Persian restaurant I've been fascinated with for years.

Because I need a really shiny reward to look forward to, I'll treat myself with two indulgences I normally wouldn't take in a million years:

1. Because I will be weak and feeble, I'll fly business class (Etihad is super luxe in business class, and also surprisingly reasonable - circa $2800 round trip), and...

2. I'm bragging about it. I'm flying business class to Kuala Lumpur, in a cool private compartment, and staying several weeks to devour street food, after swanning around Doha, and I relish your envy. I'm mostly just curious to see what saying this feels like.


I'm normally as distant from Judaism as a Pashtun warlord, but there's a line from the Torah I like very much: "If you're going to eat pork, the juice should run down your chin."


I soon recanted the boast, the complaint, and really the entire fucking thing.

2022 Dallas Trip

I did a brief Dallas trip a couple weeks ago (every winter American Airlines drops roundtrip NY-DFW fares under $100 and I grab one, per strategies explained here). Just a quickie to escape cold and get my fix of stuff found only down there. I really, really love Texas. And Dallas is the city Austin pretends to be. Real deliciousness, not posed or hipsterred into a high frothy lather.

Previous Dallas reporting here

The town was aslumber from post-COVID exhaustion and listlessness. Lots of places out of biz or too stunned to snap back into a normal operation.

Sad note: Old West Cafe in Grapevine (strenuously raved about here and here) is way, way downhill. A less careful chef can topple critical balances. The magic evaporates, and simple salty greasy food tastes - horrors - simple, salty and greasy.

But I did make a tremendous discovery. Parry Avenue BBQ, not far from downtown but in a forlorn underdeveloped stretch that might as well be the boonies, is DYNAMITE. Infinitely more vibrant than Pecan Lodge, the Nicolas Cage of hill country barbecue, which has been phoning it in for a long time. I think it might be better than the good Mueller brother (I don't track them) I tried 15 years ago in Austin,

I'm not expert enough to know the name for the style where the meat's packed in a thick crust of peppercorn. But having eaten around more than my share, I've always found that such treatment overwhelms the meat. Here, it....doesn't. I get it now.

Place is almost completely under-radar for some reason. I'll let the photos do my work for me (sometimes food is so dead-on right that there's not much to say).

Oh...the beans were galaxies better than they need to be. Dude is not just a bbq master, he's also a rather extreme food guy. Described the bean prep method to me, and I lost track halfway through. Many hours of crazy non-corner-cutting work. Finally, I understand baked beans. Need to come back and try more stuff. Ok, here goes:

One advantage of tragically downhill Old West Cafe in Grapevine is its position just a few quick minutes from DFW airport. Well, replace it with these other Grapevine grandees:

Mrs. G's Tacos is a generic-seeming taco joint. Across street from the tragically downhill Old West Cafe. I literally cannot rave enough. This is the scion of a family of late-lamented restaurants scattered throughout "The Valley" (I'm not sure what "The Valley" means, but it's sacred here). Reduced to one humble place, still pumping out greatness, stubbornly refusing to cut a single corner, doing things the old-fashioned way, and nobody gives a damn quite enough to give them the DiFara's Pizza treatment (which it deserves) to lend some support and respect and love and the ability to charge a bit more for vastly better quality.

Last of the Mohicans. I know the menu looks simple to a fault. Don't be fooled. Fly here from anywhere, eat this, fly home, it's worth it. I did not eat these tacos. I vacuumed them with my mouth. It transported me to 1926. The tortillas are homemade. They, alas, were out of pie (see photos of it on Yelp).

Here's something every Texan understands but non-Texans seldom do: Texas is German heritage (and Mexican, of course, but Northern Mexican and German heritages are intertwined, hence lager beers, accordians, and oom-pa music). Breadhaus is a vestige. Some local treats (sweet potato bars, with beans; crazy-simple raisiny "train rolls"), some familiar ones (raspberry kisses; shortbread), but certainly no macarons or other trend-mongering, and even the most ordinary items (7 grain loaves; brownies) have a deeper vibe. Feels genuinely frontier-German.

I have no idea what this little cake was, but my body nearly fainted as the photo hit my retina, apparently inducing a forgotten ecstatic trauma of some sort:

Final Grapevine place near airport: Farmers Market of Grapevine. It's a produce market with lots of diligently sourced pre-prepared and packaged food surprises hidden everywhere you look. They sell multiple varieties of Texas tamales (nothing like them anywhere else), and they're vibrant. I bought some frozen, packed with ice (the counter guy helped) and they made it back home with me intact, and that made for a good day.

You could manage a quick run to these three Grapevine places on a DFW layover, and I suggest you do!

Two lagniappes, 'cuz Texas is generous.

Lagniappe 1: I don't drink mochachinos. I am not a mochachinos person. Honestly? I'm not totally sure what a mochachinos even is. But the iced mochachinos at Commissary, right downtown in Dallas, made me see God. And he was envious as a mo-fo. Bring a rosary.

Lagniappe 2: Las Almas Rotas is the best mezcal bar in America. I was there when they opened, and they're still killin' it.

El Salvador: Hotel Panic

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas
El Salvador Day 2: Típicos
El Salvador Day 3: Quesadilla and the Death of Enlightenment
El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound
El Salvador Day 4: (Part 2) Pre-Colombian Delights
El Salvador Bits & Pieces
El Salvador/Tokyo Connection


I need to check out of the hotel in 15 minutes, but have just spilled an entire bottle of mineral water in the worst possible sector of my bed.

The maid, a kind soul, has surely witnessed atrocities beyond imagining. This is nothing. But I aim to police the happiness level in my corner of the universe, and would prefer not to be the guy who makes this "one of those days” for the nice woman.

My first thought, being me, is to approach her and tell her the soaked bed is JUST WATER, PROMISE. But, really, isn’t that exactly what an incontinent would say? Like an alcoholic insisting that’s merely coffee he's sipping?

So I use every towel in the joint to wipe and scrub and blot through layer after innumerable hotel bedding layer, each increasingly unpleasant. And I turn up the air conditioner, hoping to wick moisture into the chilly dry air. None of it helps. These are all "weak tea" (sorry for the imagery) solutions. There can be no cheap coverups. I have created what any observer would describe as a toxic waste site.

Finally, eureka. I reclaim the water bottle, shake out remaining drops, and lay it down horizontally right in the center of the wet spot.

There’s always a solution, and it’s usually simpler than you’d think.

You're welcome.


Before we wrap up El Salvador, I'll share my Google Maps list. The notes are mostly pre-visit; my reporting here supersedes. But there are gems I didn't get to. Perhaps you'll do better than I did.

Finally, here is a homely little photo I excluded from my Day 1 report on Pupuseria Chayito in Olocuilta. It's my pupusa plate after the pupusas. Just curtido and red sauce and ubiquitous wax paper.

It's obvious why I declined to include it. But after fully considering a trip where I repeatedly found myself knocked unconscious and left babbling by the things I ate - and spent an unknown amount of time drifting around Izalco, struggling to make sense of, well, anything (there were no drugs and very little alcohol, for those wondering) - I'm thinking this might have captured more than I initially realized. It's not correct, but it's expressive. It's not anything, but it sure isn't nothing. And those very dialectics defined my experience down there. 

It also represents my lingering sadness over no more pupusas.

Thank you, El Salvador, and the many people (some reading along) who helped guide me!


Lagniappe: I struggled, in my "El Salvador/Tokyo Connection" installment, to define the Spanish term "ganas". And a Sanskrit word just sprang into my mind: "bhakti". “Bhakti” is a high and holy thing in Indian religion, while "ganas" is no such thing in Catholic-dominated Spanish-speaking countries, where "urges" of any sort are looked at askance. But even the most conservative priest would respect the notion of spiritual fervor, and I'd posit that all fervor is spiritual in origin (if not always in its ultimate expression).

El Salvador/Tokyo Connection

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas
El Salvador Day 2: Típicos
El Salvador Day 3: Quesadilla and the Death of Enlightenment
El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound
El Salvador Day 4: (Part 2) Pre-Colombian Delights
El Salvador Bits & Pieces

I mentioned, last time, a kooky bakery run by a Japan-obsessed Salvadoran woman, who, never having been over there, opened a Japanese shop which, via sheer force of will and power of imagination, is seriously the most Japanese Thing that's ever existed.

If I knew, at the time, the story I would tell, I'd have photographed way more thoroughly and carefully.

I have dishonored myself.

KĀKO Cakes ("Japanese Cotton Cheesecake") is a miracle of ganas. That's an untranslatable Spanish word meaning something like "urge", or maybe "propulsive desire", but it refers to the pure inertia itself rather than any aspirational pose someone would write a song about. Your ganas is to get from point A to point B, but without squandering attention on self-consciousness. It's not about you. This is a very Japanese concept. In fact, it's the most Japanese term in the Spanish language.

And it's strikingly appropriate given the mission: bringing Japanese cheesecake - a style with little resemblance to Jewish or Italian cheesecake, and which seems like an odd culinary artifact even in Manhattan or San Francisco - to El Salvador.

I must once again invoke "Fitzcarraldo", Werner Herzog's depiction of a nineteenth century Irish robber baron's megalomaniacal obsession with bringing grand opera to the Peruvian Indians, which required, among other travails, hoisting a 320-ton steamship over a mountain.

I can't imagine know how the proprietor found the shop's location, in a woody, bucolic little shopping center which, if you squint a little, could be in the outskirts of Tokyo. And, strolling into that cluster of little shops, KĀKO Cakes does not make itself apparent. It's up a level from the rest, and tucked into a corner - exactly where a whimsical Japanese woman full of ganas might open her little labor of love.

The minuscule shop doesn't just look Japanese, which is easy. It actually feels like Japan, to an impossible degree. It was like I'd stepped into Harajuku.

So here is the cheesecake on display. It is inauthentic but very delicious. But this sort of inauthenticity is - if you'll tolerate the paradox - authentically Japanese.

It goes without saying that the proprietor has carefully studied every single Internet recipe for Japanese cheesecake, but it's also apparent that she's never tried any in person. So she may not realize how phenomenally dry it should be. Japanese cheesecake is like spongecake - really, more like foam rubber - which tastes like cheesecake but could be dragged, in cross-section, across a sheet of paper without leaving a mark. Japanese cheesecake's weird, man.

If I need to explain it to you food nerds, imagine how audacious it is to try to sell this to Salvadorans, who are only beginning to develop interest in other cuisines.

Though unique, this nonetheless expresses the essence of Japanese cheesecake. It's still considerably drier than conventional cheesecake - which has grown popular in El Salvador (remember the dandy slice with housemade fruit marmalade at Roots Cafe that I reported on last time). But it's not quite as dry as authentic Japanese cheesecake.

One doesn't get the sense that she's making it more accessible. This isn't a pander, or a misfire. It's bona fide improvement. It's better this way. And the reason I'm giving benefit of the doubt is that this recipe has clearly been worked and perfected to beyond-the-beyond, with all micro-balances smack-on to the nth degree. The intense loving workmanship that's gone into this cheesecake recalls the level of care by which a Japanese sword maker is said to invest his output with a soul.

The nearly deranged ganas invested in this shop and this cheesecake make it impossible to imagine any pandering. She's sought and found her perfection. Even if you haven't been to Japan, you've surely seen "Tampopo".

One would expect to often see such diligence in the food world. This, after all, is the job. But only a few dozen times have I experienced a really celestial degree of polish. When the curve of declining results is climbed to its loftiest reaches, one senses a consciousness offering poetic statements via sweetness, saltiness, moisture, texture, etc.

In my first book, I wrote about the mackerel sushi at a secret Japanese whiskey bar/eating club in Midtown Manhattan:

[It's] about RICE, not fish. The snowy grains are consummately plump and texturally perfect; if the chef had cooked it 15 seconds more or less The Perfect Point would have been utterly lost. They yield to teeth with exquisitely even resistence; it seems as if each one had been meticulously placed in position to ensure the ideal chewy smoothness of bite. The fish is a mere scent, a perfume that floats over the mouthful, then dissipates in a dance of flavors that eventually defers to ginger and wasabe.

That's what you can achieve with really, really - no, really - sensitive and conscientious consideration. And the Japanese are the revered masters of that sort of thing. So it all makes sense. Except that the proprietor of KĀKO Cakes isn't Japanese. And has never been to Japan.

This isn’t some Salvadoran chick's fake Japanese bakery and fake Japanese cheesecake. It’s what a young Japanese woman would come up with imagining the sort of cheesecake a girl in El Salvador, pining for Japan, might bake in a Miyazaki film. And there is nothing more Japanese than working in a meticulous and heartfelt manner, and deliberately hiding that effort to set a beauty trap of unexpected delight.

Such an approach is anomalous, and anomalies spew surprises. For example, there's the serendipitous Japanese garden visible through the side door.

My father, aunt, and uncle were experts on Japanese Zen gardens (my long-gone aunt, Claire Koffler, is still remembered for her exquisite bonsai work), and I've visited a number of them in person and viewed thousands of photos. Here are a couple:

So I was gobsmacked to spot this view from the side of the shop, so unlikely that sorcery must be involved:

If I'd fully made the Japanese garden connection before shooting this, I'd have found a more thoughtful angle. I do not deserve KĀKO Cakes.

I did not try the mochi or the handful of other non-cheesecake offerings. I did have a matcha, which was friendly/restorative but wrong in ways I couldn't quite debug, though, again, distinctively Japanese in its inauthenticity. Only a Japanese would invest such unflamboyant ganas and care. That's the Japanese connection, not any certain taste profile.

Thing is, it would be easy to miss nearly all of this. Hell, I don't know how people find even the cafe itself, positioned to resist discovery even by customers seeking it out (which is also incredibly Japanese). So this long story might be supplanted by a zippy one liner in Time Out: "Salvadoran lady opens Japanese-style bakery with good cheesecake." But those who revel in fine points and subtleties - the small end of the telescope widely neglected in the pursuit of grand prizes and big pictures - know that the really good stuff requires and rewards sensitive attention.

As a devotee of nano aesthetics, that's how I frame the world. And KĀKO Cakes is one for the ages.

Domo arigato to artist Erin Nicholls for the tip!

Go forward to "El Salvador: Hotel Panic"

El Salvador Bits & Pieces

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas
El Salvador Day 2: Típicos
El Salvador Day 3: Quesadilla and the Death of Enlightenment
El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound
El Salvador Day 4: (Part 2) Pre-Colombian Delights


Downshifting my El Salvador reporting from epic accounts to anecdotes and short stories (though there's one epic left - I'm desperately trying to boil down a 5000 word paean to a kooky bakery run by a Japan-obsessed Salvadoran woman, who's never been there(!), yet who opened an astounding little shop which, via sheer force of will and power of imagination, is seriously the most Japanese Thing that's ever existed).

Here are a bunch....



Desayuno Típico
This is (aside from swapping toast in for tortillas) is a very standard breakfast throughout the Hispanic world:

I ate this at hipster Roots Cafe, which also makes a hell of a wonderful cheesecake topped with housemade mixed-fruit marmalade. Oh, hey, I just remembered that I took a picture!

The fact that "this is a very standard breakfast throughout the Hispanic world" makes it seem easily dismissible.

Food writers and experienced chowhounds can't resist prioritizing rarity and novelty over core cuisine, and that's a particularly grievous sin in a place like this. This, once again, isn't France where waiters holler "voila!" as they reveal the spectacular soufflé. Hispanic America sees food as process, as deep tradition.

Just typing those words, I know I sound poised to condescend. But let me remind you that in three of five reports thus far I've described renditions of traditional foods which essentially knocked me unconscious and left me babbling. I've never come close to such an outcome in all my years of eager eating. So, sure, go ahead and try to explain to me how boring these traditional foods are.

"Traditional" only sounds boring because we've lost stuff. Returning home to a place like El Salvador, we slip back into deeper streams. We remember.

I've never blacked out with such frequency before. In fact, I didn't realize what the Izalco yuca had done to me until weeks later, as I organized my thoughts for the write-up. At the time, I thought I'd eaten something tasty, but in retrospect, holy crap, I was wafting around in an altered state the whole rest of that day. It was so subtle and so unexpected that I hadn't recognized what was happening.

Beneath its report, I linked to my account of the Medusa Gruel - a transcendent corn drink I once sipped in Oaxaca Mexico which was probably the greatest thing I ever ate (though Mama Grimaldi's lasagna came close). It nearly left me catatonic (I don't say that in a slick writerly way; I mean it quite literally; my host was about to call a doctor). I think the yuca, the gruel, and the lasagna may be my holy trinity; the top experiences in my lifetime of avid eating.

Dismiss banality at your peril. This is a region of spiritually elevated banality. Yet, all that said, the aforementioned breakfast is actually called desayuno típico. So they're a bit dismissive, too! You cannot out-hip them with your outsider's eye. They have grown self-aware.


The Land of Griddling

Nowhere special. I just took this photo to capture how essential the griddle has become to El Salvador. All the (many) items currently prepared on griddle were formerly - and superiorly - prepared on a clay comal. And, as I've reported, you can still find comal cooking in a few holdout places. But if you're opening a Salvadoran restaurant, you're going to need ample griddle real estate. Because here, griddling is king. Let this photo burn that fact into your retinas.


No Tamales For You!
Cruel twist of fate. You find these tamal trucks in parking lots. (Note: tamale is not a word. Singular = tamal, Plural = tamales.) You look inside and see tons of varieties. You swoon a little. And then it dawns on you that it's all refrigerated.

"Take them home and steam them!" suggested the vendor.

"I don't have a home!" I replied.

"You don't have a home?" she asks, aghast, scanning me from head to toe to verify her initial impression that I was more or less respectable.

"Not within 4000 miles!" I replied.

"Didn't you bring a hot plate?"

"No hot plate!"

What sort of shmuck travels without a hot plate? Having wasted enough time with Mr. Hopeless, the tamal lady sensibly moves on to her next client.

So bring a hot plate!


De Las Gemelas
DLG De Las Gemelas (Facebook link) is one of many twee hipster shiny shops that have popped up in the upscale El Escalón corridor. It's clearly got money behind it, and they're taking no chances with their investment, offering only the most bankable international hits of Instagram baking: macarons, cupcakes, red velvet doodads. You've seen this movie before.

But have you? Sometimes appallingly conformist, trend-mongering places - places tarted up with shiny facades that show they're angling to metastasize into soulless transnational chains - are, despite themselves, terrific. It just takes one bad apple, one weak link, one saboteur cooking with real love rather than focusing on Instagram-readiness.

God bless the good Gemela; the saboteur. The things I tried were killer. A hundred times better than necessary. Do they even realize this stuff doesn't need to taste good? That the people who patronize shiny shops and squee over halogen-lit macarons don't care about quality?

Also: what's with the Oreos? Salvadorans are, for whatever reason, obsessed with them as ingredients. They show up everywhere. No doubt someone in-country is making pupusas with them.


Puente Quemado Upshot
I mentioned two reports ago (in El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound) that I got great vibes, pre-trip, from El Salvador's smallest brewery, Puente Quemado ("Burned Bridge"), which...

....finds itself in a predicament, being way more sophisticated a craft beer operation than Salvadorans are currently able to appreciate. So those guys do as much education as brewing, hoping to build themselves a market from scratch. Very Fitzcarraldo.

I read up on them, noticing that the only venues serving their beer in the capital were exra cool-seeming places (and I used that to help build my master list for the trip). And I want to emphasize that not one person I encountered has heard of them. Not beer-loving gringos living in-country, not Salvadoran chowhounds fervidly tracking food/drink developments. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Puente Quemado is as under-radar as any find I've ever found.

Their beer is only available in large 22 oz bottles. No smallies, no drafts. So it wasn't convenient to try down there. However, I did bring a bottle of their Saison (a tangy/yeasty/dry farmhouse Belgian style) back home with me, where I've been writing these reports, and, wow, it's way better than I'd ever hoped. This isn't just surprisingly serious craft beer.

The saison I tried is as masterful an example of the style as you'll find outside Belgium. It's not good just for Latin America, it's good for anywhere. World class. Beautifully brewed, even if I'm being extra critical (I actually started as a beer writer, and was one of the first Americans to report on Belgian beer in the late 80s and early 90s).

Aguilar is a wizard, and he's in for some pain trying to draw the attention he amply deserves as perhaps Latin America's best brewer. Salvadorans are at least a decade from being able to grok how good his beer is. They're just beginning to wean from watery commercial lager, entering the "shtick" phase of big, strong, strange beers - i.e. the antithesis of "your father's watery lager". It takes time for a new market to mature to a level of sophistication where refinement and subtlety are prized (and enough premium can be charged to be viable).

If you visit El Salvador and have beer geeks in your life, bring back a bottle of Puente Quemado and stun the bejesus out of them.

Here's the saison:

...and here are some other beers (all photos are stolen), with de rigueur "AWESOME!!!" label art:

Snapshots

There's "golden light", and then there's El Salvador

Lush and blue everywhere you look.

"We will return" scrawled alongside a mural of an active volcano. Hmm. That can mean many things....


Go forward to El Salvador/Tokyo Connection

El Salvador Day 4: (Part 2) Pre-Colombian Delights

El Salvador Day 1: Strong Start with Grandma Rice Pupusas
El Salvador Day 2: Típicos
El Salvador Day 3: Quesadilla and the Death of Enlightenment
El Salvador Day 4: (Part1) Izalco Bound


"Places" are like "dishes". These are abstract two-dimensional labels affixed, ridiculously, to organic three-dimensional things. The discrepancy becomes more apparent when you get away from the bustle. And as my creaky Third World highway gave way to a rural route, funneled into a potholed one-laner, and finally collapsed into dirt increasingly undistinguishable from the rest of the countryside, obliviously crossed by broods of haughty poultry and packs of feral dogs, I was very much "away from the bustle".

That's why, despite its legend, and its presence on Salvadoran "best-of" lists, and its Google "place" entry, there is no Sopa de Gallina Caluco. It's not a restaurant name. It's the name of a common soup followed by the name of a tiny village. So if you're foolish enough to blow into town [sic] asking "Where is 'Sopa de Gallina Caluco'?", you will draw befuddled laughter. As I did.

It's like driving into Brooklyn and asking your first local "My good sir, might you direct me to an establishment by the name of Brooklyn Pizza?" Except it's worse than that, because Brooklyn actually has establishments, while Caluco has - besides the resident Calucoños (sí, lo sé) - a river, populations of feral dogs, strutting hens, plus the familiar compliment of trees, rocks, turds, and wind. And that's it. There's no 7-11. There's no post office. And "Sopa de Gallina Caluco," such as it is, appears to be some lady - or shifting slate of ladies - who may or may not choose to neglect her housework long enough to give your gringo ass some soup.

"Sopa de Gallina Caluco" is a hoax. It's like following your GPS to something called "Jim's Pancakes" and knocking on my door, demanding flapjacks. "Uh, Hi! Uh, geez, I wasn't really making pancakes right now, and this isn't actually a restaurant, and I don't totally understand what you're doing here, but, uh....."

There was an emergency conference of the citizenry where it was decided that I would be obliged.

I was guided by a six year old clutching a soccer ball into a riverside concrete bunker and seated at a bare table impressively populated by ants performing many important tasks. And finally I was asked whether I wanted "the whole meal", and I supplied the standard chowhound's reply, derived from improvisatory theater: "Yes and." Then I waited there a good long while, just me and the ants.

I had time to meditate on the essential question: Whence hen? Pollo and gallina. Chicken and hen. I'm perennially foggy on the difference, even though every decade or so it gets pounded back into my awareness, and then, from sheer disuse (I don't get a whole lot of hen), any lingering hen acquaintanceship is buried anew in brain silt. I thought I remembered hen as being tough (but worth it!), but otherwise I'd been using the terms interchangeably.

But no more. My hen memory can never again sink into brain silt.

The "whole meal" is a two parter: Hen soup...and then the hen. There's a Pete Barbutti Vegas lounge joke in there somewhere, but I won't reach for it.

Best curtido of my life:

The soup was supernal:

And the hen was...well, just look at it.

Try not to click that last photo. It would expand your view of that wondrous cheese, quite possibly making you cry. I teared up a little, but don't think anyone saw. This was the humblest and best fresh cheese I've ever eaten. Way less characterful than the brilliant stuff served at "A Casa do Jorge", south of Lisbon, but sometimes less is more.

I asked whether the cheese was made in the village. Once again, befuddled laughter. Nahh, dude. Nahh, we have the cheese flown in daily from Nicaragua on the town chopper, because we villagers are too busy incubating social media startups to flip over to VCs for a third round exit (five-banger minimum, dude). See all that vegetation? It's AR. Nahhhhhh, dude, no time for messing around with cheese here. Oh, hold on just a sec, dude; I need to bring my kid down to the river so he can shit.

Yeah, I ask the best questions.

Oh, and hen is tough. It's like chicken for bigger, stronger, better people. Decathlon champs and so forth. But worth it.

I know I haven't been offering much in the way of specific flavor description in these reports. Salvadoran is not a subtle cuisine, packed with surprises. Things taste like they look, so I let the photos carry the message. I'm also assuming you've all tried Salvadoran food in immigrant restaurants.

And if there are revelations, I'll try to rise to the descriptive occasion. But this simple fare was all unshowy tens (on my surprisingly un-ditzy system of rating foods from one to ten). Not because, like, some perfectly nuance hint of tarragon was just boffo. It's more modest magic. Perfect catnip for a devotee of nano aesthetics.

I paid pretty-much-nothing and drove on. Everyone was friendly enough, but life in remote villages is tough and they had stuff to do, and I did not fit comfortably into their movie.

Ancient Yuca Artifact
Minimal research on this one. A local food maven had sternly directed me to drive for hours to try yuca, wrapped in a fluorescent green banana leaf, at a certain place (Yuqueria de Penjamo) in Izalco, and I took it on faith, flying blind into Izalco.

Sometimes I'm oddly submissive in my chowhounding; willing to make myself driftwood and be carried by the waves. I've learned to cultivate passivity to draw in serendipity; to conjure something from nothing. See my posting "Creating a Vacuum to Leech Out Eurekas".

Yuqueria de Penjamo is hidden on a residential block of Izalco, where the yucateers combine ingredients from a panoply of white plastic buckets from a sunken courtyard far beneath a broken sidewalk. They wrap yuca salcochada (stewed) or yuca frita (fried) in enormous, fluorescent green yuca leaves, and you don't need a degree in gastro-archeology to recognize that this is pre-Colombian. You are traveling back in time.

I could feel in my bones that this is a dying art form, which, a few years from now, will be a distant memory. It has the feel of being impossibly out of its time - a feeling which leaves me immensely grateful. It's like having found the great jazz drummer Walter "Baby Sweets" Perkins, a hero of mine, playing in a little club near the airport at the relatively late date of 1987, and befriending him, and playing with him a lot, and taking him to Spain to play some more. Why am I so lucky? Why me?

I like fried yuca, but you can't beat the silkiness and subtle flavor of stewed, so that's what I asked for. Myriad things (including curtido, natch) are mixed in, plus your meat of choice: lengua (tongue), cachete (cheek), hígado (liver), corazón (heart), or patitas de cerdo (pig trotters). They run out of trotters early, so I opted for cachete.

I'm a bit hazy on this. The yuca also comes with chicharrones (pork skin), and I think that's what I'm displaying in the photo. So either the cachete never happened (and I'd missed this in the vendor's rapid-fire Spanish), or it was so tender that it was lost amid the ecstatic slimy swirls. Not sure. I was, by that point, in a drifty altered state, just barely able to click my camera button, much less probe around.

Ok, here we go:

Once again I'm left with chowmnesia. I have very little recollection, but am experienced enough to understand why. When food passes a certain threshold, your brain turns off. You can't characterize. No adjectives or metaphors arise. You are simply captivated; galvanized. You can't frame it as anything but your all-consuming immediate universe. The camera lens gets stuck. There is no editorial space.

This had happened on Day One with the rice pupusas, Day Three with the hot/fresh quesadilla, and earlier today with the potatoes in Mercadito de Merliot. At a "9" or above, I once wrote,

"Rational thought breaks down. You don't analyze, you just want to keep enjoying, blocking out all distraction.

Here's a nice article about Yuquería de Pénjamo (note that the area boasts other yuca vendors, though I do suspect that the hourglass sands are running out), and they're open Tues, Thurs, and Saturday after 2pm, and the price is whatever the hell they want to charge (it'd be worth it), or $3, whichever's lower. Click the link for a look at the whole yuca leaf package, which, in my tunnel vision, I forgot to photograph.

One final note persists. I deliberately rammed it in my memory banks at great personal expense, knowing it would be damnably hard to retrieve data in the aftermath of the total system crash caused by the yuca. Even so, I've stared at my screen for nigh unto 10 minutes, patiently waiting for the memory to recompose itself.



Ok. Got it.

It was vitally important for me to remember to tell you that you can eat the strings. Those weird, zany strings. The yuca strings. When yuca's really really super-good, and really really super right, like it was 2000 years ago, you eat the strings.

This is forgotten knowledge. I beg you: tell your children so it's not completely lost. The strings? You can eat them. When it's right. Only when it's so, so right. This is how we heal as a species.

Having performed my vital Earthly duty, I can now peacefully expire.

Staggering Aftermath
I do not understand Izalco. I drove up the hill into what I thought would be the town center, but it looked like a village even though I know this to be a major city. And as you stray onto some dull side street to park, or walk around, you might turn a corner and suddenly behold an unexpected 200 mile panoramic view across El Salvador's plains and across to multiple mountain ranges, because that seemingly modest rise to the town center somehow quietly hoisted you up the slope of an enormous volcano. In the wash of my yuca, I couldn't figure it all out. It's all dream logic. I drifted around the town square in a stupor. Almost got hit by a couple cars. Then somehow managed to find my car and get home.

What happened?


Remember my tale of the Medusa Gruel in Oaxaca, Mexico?

See the next installment