La Luna del Xelaju/Delicias Guatemaltecas Bakery

Note: another repost from old LTH list-serve, see herefor further explanation...



Is this the best Guatemalan restaurant in North America? (January 12, 2004)

I promised yesterday that I would go eat something new and report back today. Actually I think the place I went has at least been mentioned before, as a Guatemalan bakery, Delicias Guatemaltecas Bakery, 2901 N. Kedzie. However, I noticed some new signage on it including a new name (La Luna del Xelaju), which suggested perhaps new ownership and/or a fuller menu, and decided to see what they had.

The menu behind the bar was a typical all-things-to-all-people mix-- carne asada, Cuban Sandwiches, cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Instead of ordering off it I told the lady of the establishment that I had eaten at the Guatemalan restaurant (El Tinajon) on Roscoe but wanted to know what they had that was different and better. That turned out to be the best question I could have asked, not because she immediately told me what to have but because she then gave me the full story.

El Tinajon, she said, makes city food (I assume meaning Guatemala City). They are from Xelaju, a rural area on the Pacific coast, 90 miles away, and so their food is quite different. Initially they had just been a bakery, making typical Mexican bakery-looking stuff, but they had added Guatemalan and Mexican food over time, in their region's style, and now they were about to get a complete menu change, hopefully by this weekend if the printer finally finishes the new menus. It would have considerably more than the menu has now, but even now it represents a good sampling of their regional choices.

She talked me through a number of dishes but I decided to try multiple smaller, more peasanty dishes to increase my odds. (By the way, oh fans of sausage at Brasa Rojas and such places, there is a Guatemalan sausage platter to be had.) I ordered a cheese pupusa (they also have chicharron), a chicken tamale in their style, and a pache with pork, along with a homemade limeade.

The first to come was the pupusa, accompanied by a goodly amount of cortida (is that how you spell it? I only know it by sound from the Maxwell St. video). My first bite seemed a bit too crisp, I would have liked it a bit fluffier, but then she turned up again from the kitchen with a salsa-- and what a salsa! A brick-red salsa as deep in color as an artist's mixed oils, full of chunks of different shades of tomato and pepper, seeds and black bits. I wept at the beauty of this salsa, in which I could almost taste the instant that igneous mortar scraped against volcanic pestle and released all the honesty and truth of Mesoamerica's most noble vegetables. Any qualms about the crustiness of my pupusa vanished in an instant, and it was only by conjuring up thoughts of the dishes yet to come that I didn't leap up, race into the kitchen and yell "Five more pupusas!"

(By the way, later on when she was talking about their clientele, I asked her about the cortida. She said what I had today was the Guatemalan style, but on the weekends they get more Salvadoran customers and so they make it Salvadoran style, which has oregano in it but is otherwise the same. Did anyone know that? I thought there was a little cinnamon in the Salvadoran, but oregano?)

The next dish was the odd one out. It was a tamale, with a whole chicken leg in the center, a very hot red pepper salsa mixed into it and wrapped in banana leaf. But the stuff around the chicken leg was closer in texture to the custard in banana leaf at Spoon Thai than to the Oaxacan tamals at Maxwell, for instance. Clearly not masa, unless it was whipped with a tremendous amount of egg or something (but no corn flavor). I thought it might be potato (but the next dish was supposed to be potato-based). So I asked-- it's rice flour. To be honest, it was interesting to try but I found it too bland and slightly icky after multiple bites (maybe because I suddenly realized it was the exact consistency of my kids' first solid food, a rice cereal). It needed the toothiness and flavor of something like masa, this was just mush.

The next dish, a pache, which is basically a tamale made with potato instead of masa, more than made up for it. The prep was largely the same-- mashed potatoes with the red pepper salsa, chunks of pork and a jalapeno, all boiled in a banana leaf-- but the savoriness of the potatoes, plus a little squeeze of fresh lime over the pork, made this outstanding. (And even better when I added the salsa.)

So, nice folks trying hard and growing in ambition, artisanal Slow-Food-worthy homemade salsa, solid regional variations on a lot of things we know folks 'round here-- this place is a winner and looks likely to get better yet before they're done, if I were Cheap Eats I'd jump on it and hand over at least three forks, maybe four pronto. (All of the above came to the whopping sum of $8.50, by the way.) Check it out, write it up, let's pack it, they deserve it.


Photos: top, pupusas; bottom, tacos.

Followup (besides someone pointing out that the entire nation of Guatemala is in North America, though strictly speaking that doesn't automatically mean my title was wrong):

Alas, my next visit a month or two later was proof, perhaps, of Cathy2's comment that a lot of family-run kitchens are totally depended on one person for their quality. A completely different person was running the kitchen by himself, not only was the menu not expanded as promised but even MORE menu items were unavailable that day, and generally speaking, things were not as polished as before-- the food was still decent enough but the level of disorganization was a disappointment after the previous visit where they seemed to be growing in ambition and ability. This is still a place to watch, I think, but clearly of variable quality and still, perhaps, getting its act together.

A more successful follow-up experience was had here.