Pupusas à la mode

>> Los Planes offers a healthy serving of
El Salvadorian snack foods

by A.J. KINIK

Latin American cuisine’s got no shortage of superstar snack foods—think Chilean empanadas, Colombian arepas and Mexican tamales—all of which are readily available served fresh and hot from countless storefronts and street vendors that stretch from Tierra del Fuego to, well, Canada.

El Salvador’s most famous dish, and its contribution to this veritable pantheon of savoury delights, is of course the pupusa, a thick, pancake-like corn tortilla that comes stuffed with a variety of fillings, including cheese, beans and meat. Now, you’re obviously not going to find any vendors selling pupusas on the streets of Montreal any time soon because of our bizarre bylaws, but you can find them served alongside other Latin American specialties in a number of restaurants and take-outs across town. For the full Salvadorian experience, though, it pays to go to a proper pupuseria, and that’s where Los Planes on Bélanger fits in.

Check out the pupusas section of Los Planes’s menu and you’ll see that you have five fillings to choose from: con queso, with mild white cheese, loroco, which comes with cheese and loroco, an edible flower native to El Salvador, con frijoles, with their delicious refried black bean filling, revueltas, with a combination of pork and cheese, and chicharron, with their spicy ground pork filling ($2–$2.50). And unlike any other place in town that I’ve yet discovered, you also get to decide whether you want your pupusas made with corn flour or rice flour, the former being the classic version, while the latter results in a finer, somewhat more delicate variety.

Pupusas consist of simple, straightforward flavours, so you’re really meant to eat them with condiments. As a result, all the tables at Los Planes are set with an assortment that includes a giant jar of curtido, the coleslaw-like cabbage salad that’s the traditional accompaniment for the pupusa, a tangy red sauce, pickled jalapeño peppers and pickled onions. And when you order your pupusas, you’ll be awarded a hermetically sealed curtido spork. So much of the pupusa experience rests on the curtido that it’s got to be good. Los Planes’s has just the right amount of Mexican oregano and cumin, and just the right level of tanginess. The pupusas, not surprisingly, are of a quality befitting a pupuseria: fresh, hot, clearly homemade and totally satisfying.

Los Planes is much more than just a pupuseria, though. It’s also a full-service restaurant, so your pupusas can be ordered solo or as part of one of their “trios”: two pupusas plus your choice of either fried pork tacos, an enchilada, a tamale, fried plantains, or refried beans, plus your choice of either coffee or a beverage ($6.75 or less). We tried them with both the tamale de elote—a delicious tamale stuffed with a creamed corn mixture and topped with crema that had a perfect blend of sweet and sour to it—and with the tacos fritos—tasty pork tacos in fried shells, topped with salad, pico de gallo, queso and crema.

If you’re looking for something more substantial, Los Planes has a whole range of main dishes to choose from, including the outstanding tipico platter ($14.95). This cornucopia of savoury specialties includes carne asada, a delicious and rather substantial marinated and grilled steak, a chorizo sausage, rice and black beans, yucca, pico de gallo and salad. Somewhat less impressive was the BBQ chicken ($10.25). Expectations were high because the history of barbecue in the region that is now El Salvador goes back centuries, but while the dish that arrived was perfectly fine, there wasn’t anything about its preparation that distinguished it as being specifically Salvadorian.

Los Planes’s desayunos—its combo breakfasts—are a whole other matter: they’re big, beautiful, authentically Salvadorian, and, best of all, they’re served late into the afternoon. Among these, combo number one is not only first on the list, it’s also first in my heart. A mere $7.50 gets you a length of fried plantain, a hunk of a crumbly, salty queso, refried black beans, a generous helping of crema, an egg prepared any style and a coffee to wash it all down with. Top it off with a pupusa, and you’ve got yourself the ultimate $10 breakfast.