La Cuscatleca Inc. is Southwest Detroit’s best kept secret for Salvadoran food and groceries

The irony of my experiences at La Cuscatleca Inc. is not lost on me. Here I am setting out to try a cuisine that is otherwise foreign to a vast majority of Detroiters, and yet the instant I cross the threshold into the Salvadoran grocery store and restaurant, I myself become the foreign object.

As I side-shuffle through a crowd of regulars lined up to cash out at the register at the front of La Cuscatleca’s small market, blank stares pierce into me as though I must be lost. For a millisecond, even I question whether I’ve intruded upon a private event.

I duck under the archway of the wall lined with bags of pork rinds and plantain chips that separates the grocery store from the quaint restaurant, and grab a seat at one of a handful of tables. The space is less crowded and the few faces in the room seem pleasantly surprised by my presence.

There’s a different energy in the casual dining room at La Cuscatleca. Here, diners seemingly perk up, even if only slightly, as though a guest has arrived. They offer kind smiles and welcoming gestures that signal a glimmer of pride that I’ve come to experience a taste of their culture. A worker seated in the dining room drops his fork and sticks his neck into the nearby kitchen to let a server know that a customer has arrived.

A humble abode

La Cuscatleca is disguised as a restaurant, but really, it’s a homelike gathering place for Detroit’s Central American, namely Salvadoran, community. The room is minimal, accented with a few houseplants and an expansive banner that says “El Salvador.” A large, flat-screen TV is mounted in a back corner, hovering above a booth and playing a Spanish-language news broadcast. At times, you may have to remind yourself that La Cuscatleca is in fact a restaurant — your server may need some reminding, too.

She might come to your table to take your order — your response might be to request a menu. You’ll be expected to help yourself to the rotating fountain juices at the restaurant entrance. There may be a tangy-sweet drink that she’ll call orange juice but tastes more like passionfruit, or cebada, a spiced barley drink that resembles Nesquik Strawberry Milk. You can also grab a Kolashampan — a fizzy Salvadoran cola that is orange in color without even a hint of citrus flavor — a tropical fruit juice or a coconut milk-based smoothie from one of the refrigerators that line a wall of the dining room. At the end of your meal, you may need to peer into the back kitchen to request the ticket you’ll use to pay your bill at the register on your way out.

Much of the experience at La Cuscatleca is based on trust. To an extent, the menu is a formality. Descriptions of traditional Salvadoran dishes are somewhat vague and your server might not be able to elaborate. She might struggle to describe atol de elote, beyond it being a corn beverage, and all she may say about loroco, a popular pupusa filling, is that it’s a Salvadoran plant. There’s a chance she’ll try her best to find the English words for ingredients, and there’s a chance she won’t speak English at all.

But like dinner at an old friend's house, La Cuscatleca delivers one of the best home-cooked meals in town.

On the menu

Pupusas are savory rice flour griddle cakes and a landmark of Salvadoran cuisine. At La Cuscatleca, they're made by hand and stuffed with the filling of your choice. There are cheese and meat fillings, such as lean chicken and pork skin, and even zucchini for a vegetable option. There are also Salvadoran specialties, such as bitter leafy greens like mora and chipilín, which grow throughout Central America, and loroco, that Salvadoran plant the server attempted to describe. Loroco blossoms are small green flower buds that look like the heads of garlic scapes or asparagus tips. Chopped and incorporated into a pupusa, their flavor is reminiscent of a broccoli stalk, bitter with a hint of sweetness.

The best part of the pupusa is where white cheese has oozed out onto the griddle forming a golden brown lace on the surface of the patty like a charred doily. Inside, the cheese is stretchy and perfectly intertwined with its meat or veggie filling. Consistent with tradition, pupusas at La Cuscatleca are served with a side of curtido, which you’ll confuse for coleslaw, and a sippy cup filled with a salsa you may mistake for hot sauce. Unlike sweet, creamy coleslaw, curtido is a spicy salad of shredded lettuce, carrots, onions and peppers in a vinegar dressing. The cannister of salsa is a mild tomato-garlic sauce with no heat at all. (At the register during one visit, the cashier makes sure to remind me that La Cuscatleca is a Salvadoran restaurant — not Mexican, she says. “No spice here.”)

The plantains are perfect. They’re piping hot, without absorbing the grease from the fryer in the way that ripened plantains do. They’re firm, crispy on the outside and smooth — not slimy — on the inside. They’re sweet without being overly sweet, and dark in color, without tasting unpleasantly charred. They’re also served with a cool heap of crema and a porridge of refried beans.

Carne guisada, or beef stew, is hearty and tender from its long, slow bath in a rich, tomato-based broth. I opt for side salad in place of rice. The salad is humble — shredded iceberg is topped with large tomato rounds, cucumbers and sliced radishes, and it’s without dressing, but rather a lemon wedge. The real highlight though, is the large hunk of queso fresco that sits beside it. The block of salty, creamy, crumbly cheese, similar to feta in texture but milder in flavor, makes up for the lack of dressing. The dish is also served with two hot, handmade tortillas that are fluffy and doughy and dense all at once. I've dunked tears of it into the stew, wrapped it around chunks of the cheese and doused it with the tomato salsa until I run out.

A plate of crunchy-chewy chicharrones is crowded with fried yucca and curtido. The small bites of fried pork are tough in the way that gives your jaw a workout, as they should, and their counterparts are the McDonald’s fries of yucca fries. La Cuscatleca masters the yucca fry, which can be dry or uninteresting in flavor if not served properly. Here, thick cuts are creamy and delicately sweet on the inside, indicating the just-ripe-enough nature of the yucca. Thinner fries are salty and crispy with an airiness that offers the perfect crunch.

The sweet spot

There might be dessert at La Cuscatleca, but a cup of atol de elote is my treat of choice. I order the sweet, creamy corn drink at the start of my meal and by my last bite, it’s finally cooled down just enough to sip. It’s incredibly dense, like bisque in a cup or a hot milkshake, and on a full stomach, it only takes a few mouthfuls to satisfy my sweet tooth.

There is also an assortment of snacks in the grocery market on the other side of the dividing wall. There are chocobananas, fresh bananas cut in half, dipped in chocolate, coated in peanuts or colorful sprinkles and tossed into a deep-freezer beside Häagen-Dazs ice cream pops and frozen fruits. Salvadoran pastries, such as semitas or sweet breads wrapped in cling wrap sit at the counter and rows of packaged cookies lined up next to Goya seasonings sit on shelves throughout the market.

For the culture 

The significance of La Cuscatleca for the Central American community is evident. I’ve watched a mother tuck her two young children dressed in school uniforms into a booth during the lunch shift. They worked on their homework as I scarfed down soft, gritty tamales wrapped in boiled banana leaves and stuffed with shredded chicken. At almost 9 p.m., I’ve seen families spanning four generations stroll in for what seems like a normal weekday dinner. I’ve lined up behind individuals holding Central American candies and medication and bundles of plantains and eggs. Folks stop in to order hot cups of atol, which I envision is a nightcap — or fuel for a late night shift.

This place is home for so many. It’s where Detroit’s Central American community comes for a hot meal, for community, for cultural kitchen staples that aren’t readily available in traditional grocery stores and for household necessities. It’s where they can use wire service telephones to send funds to family members back home in Latin America.

There’s a reason it can feel like I’m an intruder at La Cuscatleca. In a sense, I am. Though the doors are open to all, it’s no accident that a place like this has remained under the radar for more than 15 years. Small, family-run spaces like these are sacred. They’re designed to serve the needs of a distinct community.

I recognize that they’ve welcomed me into their home, but ultimately, La Cuscatleca has carved a bit of El Salvador into this sliver of Detroit thousands of miles away from their home base. I’m just a guest.

Cuisine: Salvadoran

Price Point: Entrees under $20

Location: 6343 Michigan Ave., Detroit. 313-894-4373

Contact Lyndsay C. Green at LCGreen@freepress.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: La Cuscatleca is Detroit’s best kept secret for Salvadoran food