While down at the Grand Central Market, my girlfriend (that’s for you, Joel) remembered she had seen one of the stalls on The Best Thing I Ever Ate on The Food Network. This stall was Sarita’s Pupuseria, which specializes in…wait for it…pupusas! You know, everyone’s favorite Salvadoran food. I am a huge fan of pupusas and while I may not know what Salvadorans look for in terms of a good pupusa, I know what this unvegan likes. The pupusa featured on that show was the basic bean and cheese, so we ordered one to split just to find out if it could hit the list of the best things we ever ate.

Pupusas here were made completely from scratch, so it took a while for them to fry ours up on the griddle, but it was great to see them put it together and I definitely don’t mind waiting for freshly-cooked food. When it was ready, our number was authentically called in Spanish and we grabbed our pupusa. My girlfriend destroyed her half by putting cabbage on it, but I kept mine pristine and cabbage-free.

In the process of eating, I found that I was a fan of this pupusa, but could it really qualify as the best thing I ever ate? Sadly for Sarita, this was not the case. In fact, strangely enough I have eaten better pupusas in North Hollywood. So what was the problem? Well, I’m glad you asked. The pupusa had some strangely distinct flavor that I was unable to put my finger on. It might have been coffee or who knows, but whatever it was, I didn’t want it. On top of that, I felt the dough was still, well…doughy. I like a pupusa that you can pick up in your hand and eat, but this one didn’t offer that to me. In general, it was still quite tasty, just not worth making the cut as one of the best things I ever ate.

So the moral here?

Don’t believe everything you see on TV.

I’m not the kind of guy who judges a book by its cover. So just because a restaurant looks good on the outside doesn’t mean the food will actually taste good. But there is at least one exception and that is Flor de Izote. Located at the sketchy end of North Hollywood, I took one look at this place and knew it would be awesome. Why? Orange! Everywhere. The entire exterior was orange and so was the interior. And not surprisingly, I was wearing orange that day, so I was pretty much camouflaged. So yes my favorite color is orange, and hell yes I was excited to get down with some food in an orange room.

Flor de Izote is a Salvadoran restaurant, and I don’t know if it is always like this, but our waitress decided to only speak Spanish to our table (maybe because my coworker asked for a table in Spanish?). Nonetheless, fortunately everyone knew enough Spanish to order. The menu looked delicious, and since it was Salvadoran I concentrated on the pupusas. This was a real pupuseria and the options were plentiful. I decided to go with three different types. One was their chicken and cheese, another was their loroco flower and cheese and the final was their revueltas. The loroco is a strange flower that tastes good with cheese and dough, while the revueltas was stuffed with chicharron (pork), cheese and beans. And they were all about 2 bucks each.

When they arrived, those doughy, cheesy patties of food looked delicious. I tossed some salsa on and started digging in, having no idea which one I was biting into. The first turned out to be the chicken, which was tasty, but needed some Tapatio to really give it some flavor. The next was the revueltas. This delicious blend of beans, cheese, meat and dough made for quite a pupusa. And with a few dashes of Tapatio, it was even better. Finally I took down the loroco pupusa. The loroco is such a strange flavor and a really strange thing to eat (really who eats flowers?), but it also tasted quite good. These were some grand pupusas, but if I had to choose one to return to it would be the revueltas. It simply had the best flavor.

I also tried out some fried plantains dipped in refried beans because someone had ordered them on the side. These tasted great and I loved the mix of salt and sweet that they delivered to my mouth. Someone even ordered some crazy Salvadoran dessert. I have no idea what it was called, but I tried it and it was pretty good. Again, there was a mix of salty and sweet that I just love so much.

So, Flor de Izote was a big success and merited the amount of orange paint it used. Plus, ordering in Spanish made me think that some of the stuff I learned in high school and college actually worked.