Esmeralda's Café No. 2 is the first Salvadoran restaurant in southeastern Las Vegas, so there is bound to be confusion among first-time visitors. The cuisine isn't spicy, for one thing, and the core dishes are different from those of its neighbor to the north, Mexico, although many remain riffs in the keys of corn, rice and beans.
I've been a steady customer of the original Esmeralda's on Charleston Boulevard because I am fond of many of its dishes, especially pollo encebollado: chicken baked with onions, tomatoes, green peppers and a rich red sauce. Pupusas are delicious, as well: fat, flying saucer-shaped corn cakes cooked on a griddle with interesting fillings such as queso y loroco—white cheese laced with pieces of a medicinally sweet flower bud.
The new café isn't anything fancy but it is spacious, well-lit and friendly. Atmosphere, if you want to call it that, is provided by a gallery's worth of framed photos depicting the Salvadoran landscape, plus cute, faux, red-pepper wooden napkin holders on all of the tables.
English is at a premium and servers are not likely to speak it. The menu is in Spanish with English subtexts, so if you can point, you can order. If you are curious as to the particulars of the dishes, better bring a Spanish-speaking friend. And for a vegetarian, it may be a challenge to eat here, as the rice is made with chicken broth and the beans with lard.
Those additions, though, are what give this cuisine its distinctive cast. Salvadoran food bears a mild resemblance to Mexican but the differences outweigh the similarities.
Take the humble tamale. In Mexico, it's usually a cylinder of steamed, yellow corn-meal with some spicy beef in the center. A Salvadoran tamal, as they call it, is different. Tamal de elote is sweet, for example. A tamal de pollo, on the other hand, has a mild, shredded chicken filling. One of my favorite appetizers here are pastel de gallina, small turnovers made of an orange-colored dough that comes piping hot to the table, with more shredded chicken in the center.
Start a meal with a pupusa and you can have it stuffed with cheese and beans, pork and beans, or revuelta—stuffed with everything. You may have to ask for it to be accompanied by curtido, a pungent Central American take on coleslaw made with lots of vinegar.
The house specials are all delicious. I'm crazy about the chile relleno, a stuffed bell pepper that goes the Mexican version one better by using minced pork in the filling. Steak and onions are simple and delicious, while carne asada, thin, pounded steak cooked on a flat grill, has a nice, beefy flavor. Main dishes come with rice and beans, both excellent, plus a choice of flour or corn tortillas. If you insist on spicing things up, there are bottles of El Tapatio hot sauce on all of the tables.
Seafood is abundant in El Salvador, and in this restaurant. Camarones, the Spanish word for shrimps, are cooked a number of ways here: breaded, in an onion salsa, in spicy sauce (well, not by Mexican standards), or al mojo de ajo, in a bath of butter and garlic.
Mojarra frita, translated as fried fish on the menu, is in fact an entire perch, head and skin on, that you bone at the table. Someone should tell the chef to use a little less salt.
Then there are a number of wonderful soups. I'm guessing that in El Salvador, caldo—the Spanish word for a substantial soup cooked in a kettle—is usually a whole meal because most of them consist of several things simply thrown into a pot and boiled whole with little or no chopping.
Caldo de pollo, for instance, on the menu every day, is a hearty broth stocked with huge pieces of uncut cabbage, big chunks of carrot and around a quarter of a chicken, the meat fall-off-the-bone tender. Mondays and Tuesdays there is caldo de res, where the broth tastes of beef and the meat comes in chunks big enough to choke a lion. On weekends, there is a soup called sopa de pata, which the menu says is cow-feet soup. Isn't one foot enough?
Esmeralda's No. 2 isn't quite a clone of the original in that the menu is smaller and a few of the more ethnic dishes, such as salpicon—beef stewed with mint and radishes—aren't on the menu. One side dish no Salvadoran worth his salt would miss is yucca frita, fried yucca, a starchy root vegetable served here with curtido and fried pork cracklings. Yow!
Both times I stopped in, the kitchen was out of its only dessert, a workmanlike flan. No great loss. The best way to get a sugar fix here is actually by ordering a soft drink from Jarritos, a Mexican producer that offers flavors such as tamarind and lime. Me, I prefer to get my simple carbs from a 32-ounce Regia, El Salvador's yeasty lager beer.