RUTH TAM

Patrick and I are on our way to see a D.C. United game. But as far as fans go, we’re not exactly
hardcore.

PATRICK FORT and SIRI

P: Hey Siri, who is D.C. United playing tonight?
S: The United play the Red Bulls today at 8 p.m.

PATRICK FORT
We’re also not really there to see a D.C. United game.

PATRICK FORT and RUTH TAM

P: Why are we here, Ruth?
R: I mean, I kind of want to see the game, but I want to eat a pupusa.

PATRICK FORT
D.C. United has a brand new stadium, Audi Field in Southwest D.C. It’s Ruth’s first time there.

RUTH TAM
And following in the footsteps of other new stadiums, they have a ton of updated food options.
We’re way past the standard popcorn, cotton candy and pretzels. Once we get inside…

(bag scanning, security beeping sounds)

RUTH TAM
…we really get to see what all of the options are.

PATRICK FORT and RUTH TAM

P: We’re coming up on some food stands.
R: Butterfly, they seem to be selling elote? District Dog! I wonder if they have a half-smokes? I
gotta eat one.
P: Half smoke all the way!

PATRICK FORT
But then we find what we’re here for.

PATRICK FORT and RUTH TAM

R: I’m here for one thing and one thing only!
P: What are you here for?
R: A pupusa.
P: Two of them because they’re sold in pairs.
R: Pupusas!

PATRICK FORT
We hop in line and find D.C. United fans of all backgrounds waiting too.

FAN 1

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I mean, I think they were smart to know that there were a lot of Hispanic population in D.C. I
mean, they want their food. I think people are tired of going to the ballpark and getting like
hotdogs or a burger. I mean, I don’t even like hot dog.

FAN 2
I didn’t want to get anything that was kinda like, regular, that I could get anywhere else?

RUTH TAM
We consider the menu.

PATRICK FORT
Cheese pupusas, beans and cheese or pork and cheese. They do not take the season ticket
member discount.

RUTH TAM
Then we spot it, a quesadilla at a pupuseria. What’s up with that?

PATRICK FORT
Well, there aren’t very many standalone pupuserias in D.C. even though the dish is obviously
beloved.

RUTH TAM
But that doesn’t really seem fair to me. For all the love pupusas get, why do they have to share
a menu with Mexican dishes?

(theme music)

PATRICK FORT
This is Dish City from WAMU. I’m Patrick Fort.

RUTH TAM
And I’m Ruth Tam. We tell stories of city change through D.C.’s iconic foods.

PATRICK FORT
The pupusa is the most recognizable food from El Salvador. So why do pupusas have to a
share a menu with quesadillas, tacos and burritos?

FAN 3
I think it was mainly for the gringos...

RUTH TAM
On this episode of Dish City: Pupusas and Salva Mex restaurants.

PATRICK FORT
Pupusas have been sold at D.C. United games for as long as the team has existed. It seems
like a nice way to acknowledge the team’s fans from El Salvador – which is the home of the
pupusa -- and also Raul Diaz Arce, the D.C. United player who scored the team’s first ever goal
back in 1996.

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SPORTS ANNOUNCER 1 and SPORTS ANNOUNCER 2
S1: Oh, this is a goal scoring opportunity. It’s in the net! It’s in the net! D.C. on its first ever goal.
S2: The stadium is shaking, Gordon!

RUTH TAM
When we pick up our pupusas at Audi field, we’re about a hundred feet away from D.C. United’s
Barra Brava, a fan group modeled after similar soccer fan groups in Latin America.

(Barra Brava chanting)

PATRICK FORT
We dig in -- each warm ball of masa is stuffed with pork and cheese or beans and cheese,
before they get flattened and griddled. They get served with salsa and curtido, a tart cabbage
slaw.

PATRICK FORT and RUTH TAM and SERVER

P: Well?
R: They have curtido! And salsa.
P: We got forks up here too.
S: Next in line guys!

PATRICK FORT and RUTH TAM

P: So on the scale of like, under to overwhelmed, how do you feel? Considering the bar for
stadium food is a lot lower.
R: And it’s like, a pupusa is like super multidimensional. There's like so much going on. The
gooey cheesy interior, like the crisp, crusty, hot exterior. But yeah, this pupusa doesn’t really
have as many of those things, but it’s still like, I’m impressed that it’s here.

(music)

RUTH TAM
I wasn’t surprised to see a quesadilla on the menu at this pupusa stand. After all, there are a lot
of Salvadoran Mexican or ‘Salva Mex’ restaurants in D.C. But no one was getting a quesadilla!
Why couldn’t this just be a pupusa stand?

PATRICK FORT
Salvadorans are D.C.’s biggest immigrant population. There are 20,000 Salvadorans living in
the District, and an additional 200,000 living in the surrounding suburbs. Surely, pupusas and
Salvadoran food alone could support ample business. The Salvadoran population has been
established here for a long time!

JOSE CENTENO MELENDEZ

Way back in the 1960s and 70s, there were folks who were already here in Washington D.C.
making a home. They were already folks who were either employed by the embassies. These
would be like nannys, homeworkers, and these are just folks who were like, we would consider
them the pioneers of the community.

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RUTH TAM
This is Jose Centeno Melendez. He studies Latino and American identity and he’s working on a
project documenting the history of D.C’s Salvadoran community.

JOSE CENTENO MELENDEZ

I was born in New York. My familial heritage goes back to El Salvador.

PATRICK FORT
From 1979 to the early 90s, El Salvador underwent a brutal civil war. The U.S. supported the
Salvadoran government, who used death squads to target left wing groups fighting for labor
rights. Thousands of people died and about 20 percent of all Salvadorans were displaced. D.C’s
small Salvadoran community attracted lots of people who were leaving for the U.S. Many settled
in Adams Morgan, Mt. Pleasant and Columbia Heights.

RUTH TAM
Jose split his childhood between El Salvador and the Washington region –specifically Hyattsville
in Maryland’s Prince George’s County. Back in El Salvador, he grew up eating his
grandmother’s home cooked Salvadoran food -- fried fish, tamales -- and he has very distinct
memories of eating pupusas.

JOSE CENTENO MELENDEZ

In El Salvador, typically when you eat a pupusa over there, usually it would be women who were
preparing the pupusas outside and like a griddle-type situation. And we’d sit outside and they’d
serve you like the pupusas in like a plastic plate with like a little plastic sheet of paper over it.
And you’d eat.

RUTH TAM
But pupusas in the D.C. area? Totally different experience for Jose.

JOSE CENTENO MELENDEZ

I remember this one time that we went to one restaurant called El Gavilan in Silver Spring. And
there was live music. Their, you know, dim lights are like blue, red, to like create some sort of
ambiance. And I noticed that my mom and my pops were eating what I know today as fajitas
and drinking margaritas. And like I had never seen fajitas before, I don’t think.

RUTH TAM
Mexican food is so integral to eating in America that it’s kinda hard to imagine it as new. But
that’s exactly what it felt like to Jose.

PATRICK FORT
And let’s talk about the fajita craze. It wasn’t just that restaurant Jose’s family went to. It seemed
like there was a time in the 90s where every national chain was advertising a sizzling fajita
griddle.

TACO BELL COMMERCIAL

When you need a fajita

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The Bell’s the place to be, yeah!

MCDONALDS COMMERCIAL
Needa fajita
Now at McDonald’s, a new taste
Chicken fajitas!
Only 99 cents each!

JOSE CENTENO MELENDEZ

Definitely never seen like foodstuffs like margaritas, or like the chips and salsa to me were also
a foreign concept. Me and my brother and my sister were eating pupusas. And so that to me
was like a moment of what is going on?

PATRICK FORT
The pupusas were familiar, sure. But eating them at a restaurant? This Salva Mex place? It was
so strange.

JOSE CENTENO MELENDEZ

I’m eating a pupusa inside of this air-conditioned restaurant. And that just, I don’t know, it just
like, it really caught me off guard. And it led me to ask a lot of questions about like, well what is
this place and what does it mean?

RUTH TAM
This vivid memory in an air-conditioned restaurant was Jose’s first experience with culture
shock.

ANA REYES
I do remember in the 90s, like fajitas being really like, wow, people were wowed at the sizzling,
you know, plate. And like…

PATRICK FORT
Ana Reyes is the general manager of El Tamarindo, one of the first Salva Mex restaurants in
D.C. Her father immigrated from El Salvador in the 1980s.

RUTH TAM
For a number of Salvadorans, who recently settled in the D.C. area, working in restaurants
serving Mexican food was a really popular way to make a living. Ana’s father got his start at a
Mexican restaurant on the Waterfront as a busboy, then he became a dishwasher and later a
cook. When he and Ana’s mother opened El Tamarindo in 1982, it was one of the first of its
kind.

ANA REYES
I think there were like two restaurants that served Salvadoran food.

PATRICK FORT
And in the early days of El Tamarindo, fajitas were on the menu. Even as a kid, Ana knew it was
strategic.

5
ANA REYES
We were very aware of like the business aspect. And the menu, we could probably answer any
question on the menu by the age of like eight.

RUTH TAM
In addition to fajitas, there were tacos, burritos, margaritas. Serving Salvadoran and Mexican
food on the same menu meant that El Tamarindo could cater to different diners’ tastes at the
same time. It made sense for business.

ANA REYES
Their desire to open up a restaurant wasn’t because that they had been super passionate about
being restaurateurs. No, they were trying to give their families a better life, and they’ve done
that.

PATRICK FORT
Because of all the groundwork laid by people like Ana and her parents, Salva Mex restaurants
became increasingly popular. And not only in D.C.

NATALIE ESCOBAR
I love Salva Mex restaurants so much. Because I mean that’s really what I grew up eating.

RUTH TAM
Natalie Escobar is a Washingtonian who grew up in San Francisco.

NATALIE ESCOBAR
I’m Salvadoran but I didn’t just grow up eating Salvadoran food. Like, I grew up in a city that had
a lot of Mexican food. I just grew up eating so many different kinds of foods.

PATRICK FORT
For Natalie, eating different cuisines together was natural. It was the product of living in such a
diverse city. But for as diverse as San Francisco was, plenty of people assumed she was
Mexican because there wasn’t as big a Salvadoran presence there. That changed in D.C.

NATALIE ESCOBAR
The first time I came here, I was so overwhelmed by how many Salvadorans I just saw. It
reminded me of the one time I got to go to El Salvador when I was a kid. There were just so
many people that looked like my family around me and it was like really comforting in a way I
didn’t know I could feel.

RUTH TAM
When we asked Natalie about the absence of Salvadoran-only restaurants in D.C. -- why are
pupusas so often paired with Americanized Mexican cuisine? She kind of rejected the basis for
our question. Putting a burrito on a menu doesn’t mean you’re not proud of El Salvador!

NATALIE ESCOBAR

6
To say that like, the authentic experience of like Salvadoran cuisine is just to eat pupusas and
like tamales and sopa de gallina, is not really accurate because a lot of like Latino first gen and
second gen kids grew up eating kind of you know like, you know, whatever is available.

PATRICK FORT
To Natalie, the experience of being Salvadoran in America is best reflected in these hybrid
Salva Mex restaurants.

RUTH TAM
And I think that’s because Salva Mex restaurants aren’t fusion food. They’re not being
frankensteined together by a celebrity chef just for kicks. These cuisines have simply been
included on the same menus all over the District because of, well, survival.

PATRICK FORT
Salva Mex restaurateurs aren’t the only business owners who’ve done that. More after the
break.

--

PATRICK FORT
Let’s take a detour for a second. Cooking other people’s food --food that’s more well-known
than your own-- is not new in America at all.

RUTH TAM
Chef Seng Luangrath had to do just that when she first came to the states, from Laos. She
learned pretty quickly that not only did American diners not know Lao food, they didn’t even
know where Laos was.

SENG LUANGRATH
A lot of people ask where I was from, of course. And I had, I would say “I’m from Laos.” A lot of
people didn’t understand, “Where’s Laos?” So it’s kind of like for me, when I say [I’m] Thai, I’m
from Thailand, and people would just say “Oh! I know where Thailand.”

PATRICK FORT
Seng grew up cooking for her family and loved working in a kitchen. So in the early 2000s, she
started doing her research about buying a restaurant. She knew that American diners were far
more familiar with Thai food than Lao food. But she also knew the Thai food Americans ordered
had roots in Lao cuisine.

SENG LUANGRATH
When I have some of the dishes, it’s Lao food, and it was under a Thai menu. That, a lot of Lao
food, has been misrepresent.

PATRICK FORT
In 2010, she bought Bangkok Golden, a Thai restaurant in Falls Church. And then, slowly, she
started sneaking in Lao dishes to interested customers.

7
SENG LUANGRATH
When I first started, it wasn’t any menu at all. It was just, you know, just educated my team
members to, when the guest come in, tell them a story. You know about, we’re a Thai restaurant
but we also have secret Lao menu. So that’s how it started. And we just verbally tell our guests
that we have certain dishes and explain to them what the dishes were. And we, slowly, it just
become like word of mouth. And when people come, they ask for Lao menu.

RUTH TAM
The Lao food was a hit. Bangkok Golden was rebranded as a new restaurant, Paedek, which
embraces its Lao side instead of hiding it on a secret menu. Now, Seng owns three other Lao
restaurants in the D.C. area, and she’s become an ambassador for her food and a mentor for
chefs who’ve come from countries whose cuisines are less well known in America. Seng really
had to take the long route in order to eventually cook Lao food. Do immigrants chefs today still
have to do that?

SENG LUANGRATH
You don’t need to do that. At this point in time, I don’t think you need to do that

PATRICK FORT
It kind of sounds like she’s made it. She can cook what she wants, not what Americans are used
to.

RUTH TAM
Yeah, but even though Chef Seng is a huge advocate for lao food, it doesn’t mean that Thai
food doesn’t have a place on her current menu.

RUTH TAM and SENG LUANGRATH

R: So, on your menus now for your Lao places, do you have like some Thai dishes that you
have just like thrown in on the side or is it just Lao all the time?
S: I do have a few dishes that is Thai that I grew up eating and I loved it so much that I kept it on
there. And some of the dishes was inspired by some of the Thai dish that I love. I have this curry
puff that I love eating. It’s Southeast Asian. So you’ll see it on a lot in Thai menu. So I took that
from Bangkok Golden to Thip Khao. So it’s been on the menu ever since and people still loved
it.

RUTH TAM
Despite being a huge champion for Lao food and fighting to have a menu of mostly Lao dishes, I
was kind of surprised when I first went to Thip Khao, a restaurant of hers in D.C., and saw that
Seng had a separate list of dishes she calls her “jungle menu.” There’s chicken hearts, pig ears,
alligator, goat curry – and she says these are for more “adventurous” eaters.

PATRICK FORT
I guess it shows that you can be a huge cheerleader for your country’s cuisine, but you still have
to kind of like educate or cushion unfamiliar diners if you want them to be repeat customers.

RUTH TAM

8
Right. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about this over the course of the season of about what it takes
to survive as a restaurant owner in D.C. and what kinds of concessions you might need to make
to stay open. Asking Seng to be an all-Lao food all-the-time advocate is a lot! Besides, if she left
that curry puff on her menu because she loves, I wouldn’t want her to stop cooking it.

RUTH TAM
We were weighing a lot -- the uniqueness of the food you grew up with, the joy of cooking what
you love, and the pressures of attracting customers and trying to predict what they will like. So
we decided to mull it over with Natalie Escobar over, what else? Pupusas and tamales at
Gloria’s Pupuseria.

NATALIE ESCOBAR
Un pupusa de revueltas…

PATRICK FORT
Everyone there was watching the same telenovela, and we’re not the types to interrupt, so we
pivoted and took our pupusas to go.

RUTH TAM
Natalie has such deep affection for Salva Mex restaurants. We wanted to know how she
squares her passion for Salva Mex food with her pride in her Salvadoran heritage.

NATALIE ESCOBAR
When people think of El Salvador they don’t think of like, the cuisine and like somewhere that
you’d want to go on vacation and like try all of the local cuisines that like people think of when
they think of Mexico and Mexico City especially. For better for worse, Salvadoran food hasn’t
like broken into the mainstream because like you don’t see travel writers going there and like
waxing poetic about like the amazing pupusa they had at like a local vendor.

RUTH TAM
Earlier that day, Natalie had shown her coworkers how to eat pupusas with cortido. She took
responsibility for educating her peers -- because for a lot of them, pupusas were a brand new
food. It reminded us a lot about the responsibility Chef Seng told us she feels about sharing Lao
food. If Natalie didn’t show her coworkers how to eat a pupusa, who would?

NATALIE ESCOBAR
Pupusas and El Salvador aren’t sexy in a way that like Mexico and Mexico City are to
Americans. Like my friends have been there on honeymoons, they like have taken cooking
classes in Mexico City. But like, nobody I know has been to El Salvador unless they have
relatives there.

PATRICK FORT
Celebrating El Salvador’s cuisine and culture through an entirely Salvadoran menu seems like a
silver bullet, right? If you’re Seng and you’ve built Thip Khao, you’ve put Laos on the map for
D.C. diners! So why not do that with Salvadoran food?

NATALIE ESCOBAR

9
I want people to understand El Salvador is a place where beautiful things are and like there’s a
rich culture, and like, so many people who love the country. For all of the violence, and all of the
corruption, all the really hard stuff that’s happened there, like I want people to see it in all of its
complexity and part of that complexity is like the food that people love and that I’ve grown up
with. I guess it’s part of like adding to a country’s story.

RUTH TAM
At the end of the day…it’s a lot to ask restaurants to change America’s perception of a whole
country and its culture. Food is an entry point into people’s lives, but not a token for
understanding everything about their culture or history. By the end of our conversation, we didn’t
feel all that odd about Salva Mex food at all.

NATALIE ESCOBAR
I love being able to go to a place and know that I could get a taco, I could get a pupusa, I could
get sopa de gallina and it would all be really fucking good.

PATRICK FORT
Dish City is produced by me, Patrick Fort.

RUTH TAM
And me, Ruth Tam. Our editor is Poncie Rutsch.

PATRICK FORT
Our theme music is Daniel Peterschmidt and Ben Privot mixes the show.

RUTH TAM
WAMU’s general manager is JJ Yore and Andi McDaniel oversees everything we make here.

PATRICK FORT
The song you’re hearing now is called “Mexican Chef” by Xenia Rubinos. Thanks to Emily
Guskin for recommending it to us.

RUTH TAM
If you wanna talk to us online, we’re on Twitter and Instagram at @dishcity. And our email is
dishcity @ wamu.org.

PATRICK FORT
If you wanna talk to us in person, we’ll be grabbing drinks at bars around the district the
Tuesday after each episode drops. On Tuesday, October 15th, we’ll be posted up at Reliable
Tavern in Petworth from 6-8:30.

RUTH TAM
If you love dish city, tell a friend! And review us on your favorite podcast app. It’ll help listeners
like you find our show.

PATRICK FORT
We’ll be back next week with a new episode, so hit that subscribe button. Later!

10
RUTH TAM
See ya next week!

PATRICK FORT
Catch you on the flippity flop.

11