Richmond’s 23rd Street serves homemade pupusa magic

The pupusa truck at Richmond Eats doesn’t need to shout to get your attention. It sits there in the corner of a sunbaked lot on 23rd Street, under a white canopy flapping gently in the afternoon breeze. It's the kind of setup that reminds you that great food doesn’t always come with great fanfare.

Richmond Eats

Order online directly from the restaurant Richmond Eats, browse the Richmond Eats menu, or view Richmond Eats hours.

A few plastic chairs, a handwritten menu, and the steady hiss of something good hitting the griddle.

We’d eaten at Richmond Eats before, back when the truck’s brick-and-mortar location first opened on Macdonald Avenue. There’s always that nagging guilt when you judge a restaurant by its burrito, knowing their best work might never leave the kitchen. Is it fair to evaluate a Salvadoran kitchen by its burrito?

Since the Salvi burrito hasn’t made it north from LA yet, our visit this time was all about the pupusas.

Pupusas are El Salvador’s national dish, made with masa stuffed with various savory fillings before being cooked on a griddle. The most common fillings include cheese, refried beans, seasoned ground pork, or a combination of these, known as revuelta. You don’t even need to go to a restaurant; pupusas are also cooked up in food trucks, on street corners, and in driveways across the city.

Taqueria La Bamba has been our longtime baseline. We were picking up burritos years ago when we saw the pupusa artists at work at La Bamba, grabbing a handful of masa, rolling it into a ball, pushing filling into the masa, before forming it back into a ball, slapping it back and forth into a flat disk, and laying it on the hot grill.

We glanced at the diner's plates – no burritos. They were eating these enlarged, stuffed tortilla things topped with cabbage and drizzled with La Bamaba’s hot red salsa.

Richmond Eats’ take is something else: thicker, fluffier, softer in the middle, and just a bit more tender around the edges.

The curtido comes in a humble Ziploc bag, vinegar bright, shredded cabbage crisp, carrots giving a little snap with a hint of oregano; it is not spicy like La Bamba’s. The salsa roja arrives in its own plastic pouch, the kind you snip open and pour like a secret. Rip off some pupusa, grab some curtido, douse it with salsa, pop it in your mouth, and suddenly the world gets quiet. The tang cuts through the richness; the warm masa, the gooey cheese, the shredded pork all magically meld together.

Three pupusas cost $13 and come with curtido and salsa.

Puspusas look simple, but they’re not. If you’ve ever had visions of UNLIMITED PUPUSAS and headed for the corner store for a bag of masa flour and some cheese, you'll know it is hard. Is the consistency right? Too wet. Too dry. Now, squeeze it together into a ball without the filling coming out. Now flatten it enough to cook without it crumbling. Ugh. Leave it to the professionals.

Which is exactly why places like Richmond Eats matter. They’ve mastered what the rest of us can only fumble through.

There’s something poetic about the way a Richmond Eats food truck sits surrounded by parked cars and cracked asphalt, still turning out food that tastes like someone’s home. You can order panes con pollo or tamales de elote, but there are no burritos on the menu. It’s just doing the work, one hot, blistered pupusa at a time.

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