It’s rare to go to a restaurant where you can order their signature dish for less than $5,
but pupuserias are one kind of restaurant where that is possible.
Focusing on the Latin American dish, which consists of a cake made with corn or rice flour stuffed with various ingredients, pupuserias tend to price their pupusas low so that customers can try as many kinds as they want.
For a while, these kinds of restaurants were uncommon in Montgomery County. That changed in 2004 when a husband-and-wife duo opened Pupuseria El Comalito in Gaithersburg, hoping to bring cuisine from their home country of El Salvador to the area.
Fast forward 20 years, and El Comalito has expanded to locations in Takoma Park, Silver Spring and Riverdale Park, celebrating its 20th anniversary in May.
“I grew up with my parents always working in restaurants,” says Silvia Huezo, who co-owns El Comalito with her parents, the founders. “I would spend my weekends playing in the back rooms [of the restaurants] while they were working. When my parents decided to open their own restaurant, I was a senior in high school, so I didn’t really know what I was doing. I Googled everything and pretended to know what I was talking about, and we all learned through the journey.”
Huezo’s parents grew up in El Salvador and met because they were both bakers. While they specialize in pupusas now, they still sell El Salvadoran pastries at small bakery counters in the front of each El Comalito location.
Pupusas have a long history in El Salvador, having been named the country’s national dish in 2005. There’s even a National Pupusa Day on the second Sunday of November. The dish serves as a cornerstone of the El Salvadoran economy because it is often simple to make and uses cost-effective ingredients.
“Pupusas are a food for everyone,” Huezo explains. “El Salvador is a very poor country, so we make do with what we have. The grains that grow on the land easily are what become part of the menu.”
Traditionally, pupusas are made using clay griddles. But these are uncommon in U.S. kitchens, so El Comalito’s kitchen uses a flat griddle.
“Everyone’s pretty friendly here. We share the same culture with a lot of other Latino people,” says Cristian Palencia, a cashier at El Comalito. “The customers that we get in are often from the same culture, so everything is pretty relatable.”
Gaithersburg’s El Salvadoran community was relatively small when El Comalito opened. But it has grown significantly, bringing in more customers yearning for authentic flavors from their homeland. Huezo describes it as “a little piece of home,” though she notes that it has been rewarding to introduce people from other cultures to El Salvadoran flavors and dishes.
Both Huezo and Palencia say that their favorite things on the menu are the pupusas made from rice flour. The former added that since corn flour pupusas are so much more common, many people don’t even realize that you can make pupusas with rice. But they are a regional specialty in El Salvador and have a crunchier bite than corn flour pupusas.
As for filling, El Comalito’s top seller is its revuelta pupusas, which is stuffed with a mix of cheese, pork and beans. Many of the ingredients used are imported from larger-scale wholesalers, but the restaurant does make its own horchata, grinding down rice and other grains to make a paste for the sweet rice-and-milk-based drink.
Huezo adds that she hopes to connect with local farms to supply vegetables for the restaurant, as well as potentially simplifying the menu that has remained nearly unchanged for 20 years.
“I would love to have a menu that gets creative but that is still very much representative of our cuisine, of our culture,” she says.
As her parents age, Huezo is looking toward the future of El Comalito. She manages the restaurant’s social media presence but hopes to expand the team. She also hopes to expand their coffee and pastry-related offerings—people in El Salvador will eat pupusas for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but having a larger variety of sweet breakfast food and desserts could be a boon.
Above all, though, she wants to keep delivering the same quality that El Comalito has for the past 20 years.
“My biggest disappointment was going to another pupuseria and watching as they placed a frozen pupusa on the flat griddle,” she says. “What sets us apart is that our pupusas are freshly made, for the same artisanal way they have been for centuries in
El Salvador.”
