Emerita's Mexican and Salvadoran Cuisine, 5408 Queens Chapel Road, Hyattsville, MD 20782, 301-559-7400.

Truly long-time readers of this blog may recall that it has been at times sharply critical of Markos Moulitsas, aka "Kos" of Daily Kos. Now is not the time to rehash and reminisce about petty blog sniping of now one year's aging. On certain matters, however, this blog absolutely defers to Kos, to wit: issues involving Salvadoran cuisine. Kos is of Salvadoran heritage and lived there; I am not and have not. A few weeks ago, Kos urged readers to go to Salvadoran restaurants and try out pupusas if they had not had them before. I decided to take Kos up on his suggestion.

One could probably make an entire blog from posts sampling the ethnic restaurants within a three-mile radius of Langley Park, not only Salvadoran restaurants, though that is among the largest ethnic/national origin groups in the Hyattsville/Langley Park area. I went into Emerita's on Queens Chapel Road maybe 1/2 mile from the West Hyattsville Metro station this evening and ordered two pupusas with cheese to go. What is a pupusa? It is a pocket of thick tortilla filled with cheese and sometimes other ingredients such as pork or beans, between a baseball and a softball in diameter and maybe 3/8-1/2 inch thick. The photo above has two pupusas to the top. It is customary to eat a pupusa with curtido, a marinated cabbage slaw (curtido with salsa/vinegar at the bottom.) Two pupusas with curtido came to $2.70 plus tax.

In his suggestion, Kos urged his readers to make sure to eat them "the right way" and to ask for directions. Well, I forgot to do so, but this message board suggests that Salvadorans may perhaps have differing opinions as to whether to put the curtido into the pupusa, whether to use fingers or a knife and fork, whether to fold it over, etc. I suspect that Kos was playing a little prank on his readers regarding "the right way" - there is no one right way, perhaps. Not knowing which to do, I used knife and fork.

The pupusa itself was pretty mild and quite suggestive of a quesadilla to my palate. The curtido I enjoyed less; while I may simply not know the cuisine well enough, the curtido seemed to have a bite or edge not to my liking. Perhaps my palate was affected from an expectation that the salsa would reflect the Tex-Mex flavors to which I was accustomed, or the confluence of cabbage and salsa was not to my taste. While I cannot say I thoroughly enjoyed the pupusas, it was a worthwhile experience and I would consider going back to Emerita's for other meals as well as to other pupuserias for pupusas of different styles and different curtido. The slightly-bigger-than-mom-and-pop restaurant was friendly and very informal with substantial seating and Spanish-language Family Feud on the TV, and its menu includes many Mexican/Tex-Mex dishes familiar to many Americans as well as some Peruvian dishes. The decor in Emerita's had a clear Salvadoran theme, not Mexican.

In short, a new experience, and I recommend it; the curtido may just hit the spot for you.