Winchester, VA
Monday, July 15, 2013
On Tuesday, April 2, 2013 I lunched with a friend at Pupuseria Puerto La Union, a restaurant that opened on March 12 at 2832 Valley Avenue in Winchester. It's at the former location of an Italian Place called Fratelli's Italian Grill, and I remembered having good pizza there once with my oldest son and his wife in 2009.
This place is now a restaurant offering both Italian and Salvadoran food. The menu has three pages for Italian food and two for Salvadoran. You can get Italian food at many places around Winchester, so I ignored that part of the menu. I ordered three pupusas, intending each to have a different cheese filling, but the two of them I ate tasted the same.
The pupusas were rather bland, and needed to be topped with salsa to have any taste; perhaps that's their nature. They were accompanied by curtido, a lightly fermented cabbage slaw with red chilies and vinegar. That also helped with the flavor. The pupusas were larger than I expected, and my friend took the third one home with her.
We also had servings of tidbits of deep fried cheese, but I didn't get their name. They were finger food that was a bit messy to eat. We ordered bottled fruit soft drinks; Cheryl's was mandarin orange, and mine was pineapple. On my next visit I'll skip the pupusas and try other Latin American entrees.
After lunch we visited Mercado Santa Fe, a Hispanic grocery at 2836 Valley Avenue next door to the restaurant. We went up and down all of the aisles, and my friend, who likes to prepare ethnic foods, made several purchases here for her pantry.
— Perry Crabill