Aw, <i> Shuco</i> . . . and <i> Pupusas</i> , Too

Atlacatl Number 2 is a handsome Salvadoran family restaurant on that mid-town stretch of Beverly Boulevard dominated by ethnic markets and the kind of bikini bars whose names resonate through tough-guy novels: The Last Call, One Eye Jack, Club Ihung, One for the Road. Where most Salvadoran restaurants are sort of tatty dives--tatty dives with some very good food--Atlacatl is a Nice Place to go for decent carne asada , sweet-and-sour chicken with sauteed onions, or Salvadoran-style chiles rellenos stuffed with meat.

In an earlier incarnation, Atlacatl was a go-go bar too, the Beverly Gardens, which was locally famous for flat beer and brazen hostesses, also for the wild tangle of grasses and untrimmed banana trees that surrounded the joint. Atlacatl’s flora is impeccable now, like something neatly pruned around an expensive jungle retreat. There are tables and plush carpets where the boom-boom stage had been before. Silk flowers bloom on table tops and everything is clean.

The first time I set foot in Atlacatl, I had just passed into the restaurant when I heard a dull thud. One of my friends, who is very tall, had knocked his forehead squarely on the top of the door frame, and I turned in time to see him crumple slowly to the ground as if he had been shot. He lay still, unmoving. Two cooks peered out of the kitchen to see what was going on. The waitresses giggled quietly into their hands. Three or four guys who had sidled to the front of the restaurant, pretending to check out the new selections on the CD jukebox, took in the scene out of the corner of their eyes. My friend rubbed his temples and groggily got to his feet.

“Are you OK, my friend?” somebody asked, apparently an owner. “Come, get something to eat.”

If Frank Sinatra himself had walked into the restaurant just then, accompanied by Joey Bishop, Charo and the two sisters from Heart, he couldn’t have upstaged my friend. I felt as if I were dining with a celebrity.

Most Salvadoran restaurants specialize in antojitos --apart from antojitos , snacks, Salvadoran food is pretty close to every other Central American cuisine--and it seemed like we got one of everything that afternoon. There were pastelitos , little fried turnovers stuffed with a savory mixture of spiced ground beef; dryish sweet-corn tamales ; plantains fried to a crusty black, caramel-sweet, with thick Salvadoran sour cream and salty, pureed black beans; and casamiento , “marriage,” which is beans and rice fried to a mush in an impossible amount of lard, then served with the Salvadoran cream and a brick of crumbly cheese.

We had thick logs of the tuber yuca, deep-fried until crusty and served with sour cabbage slaw and big chunks of fried pork. We tried shuco , which is a thin corn gruel, slightly sweet, with a few black beans lurking at the bottom of the bowl. (The waitress beamed sweetly when we asked what it was, but shuco might be a little spartan for anybody not directly nostalgic for the stuff, a real poverty stew.) We were pretty full.

If you know even a little about Salvadoran antojitos, you’ve probably heard of the pupusa , a 45-rpm-size discus of corn meal that’s stuffed with cheese or meat then baked to order on a griddle. It’s more or less the Salvadoran national snack. I’ve probably eaten in three dozen Southland pupuserias and I used to think all good pupusas were about the same: crisp masa , melted cheese, hot grease tempered by the cool acidity of the cabbage slaw curtido that you pile on from a giant crock. Atlacatl’s cheese pupusas are even better than that--chewy as well as crisp, cheese more pully than runny, spiked with pungent chunks of loroco --which is kind of a Salvadoran asparagus equivalent--and the spicy, tart curtido is pretty great too. Two or three pupusas make a fine light lunch, maybe sloshed down with a bottle of Salvadoran Pilsener beer.

And if the food doesn’t knock you off your feet, you can always forget to duck.

Atlacatl Restaurant Number 2, 301 N. Berendo, (213) 663-1404. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Cash only. Beer and wine. Lot parking. Takeout. Dinner for two, food only, $11-$18

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