Mollusk Madness

Honduras Kitchen is a splendid little place on the western edge of Huntington Park, alive with the fragrance of onions and frying meat. One wall is covered with a mural of a mythically beautiful Honduran rancho; the other side of the room is lined with Honduran travel posters labeled with handwritten tags. There is a rustic eave over the cash register, soccer flyers on the counter, and a framed collection of Honduran money by the door. The restaurant feels as if it is on the other side of the world, but over surface streets it is only a 10-minute drive from downtown. Though Los Angeles teems with restaurants serving Salvadoran, Nicaraguan and Guatemalan food, this may be the only Honduran place in town.

The single-item restaurant thrives in the Southland: Chili John’s for a bowl of red, Lawry’s for prime rib, Cole’s for dipped roast-beef sandwiches, the Oyster House for a dozen bluepoints. When you’re in the mood for steak, there’s Taylor’s; for bean curd, Beverly Soontofu. There’s even a Taiwanese rice-gruel joint called Porridge King.

Painted on the window of Honduras Kitchen, in bold red script, is the legend ‘ ‘La Casa de la Sopa de Caracol. “ Though it serves garlicky grilled pork chops, good fried fish, a mushy though flavorful carne asada , the restaurant is something of a shrine to the mighty caracol , a Caribbean mollusk that is culinarily, if not biologically, identical to the Italian scungilli and the Florida conch . . . though the word caracol translates literally as “snail.”

The restaurant serves caracoles fried in crisp batter, doused with citrus and grilled until they resemble a sort of veal piccata of the sea. They also come raw in spicy cocktails and boiled in the restaurant’s famous soup. At Sunday lunch, over the blare of salsa music, over the din of conversation and wailing babies, is the thwack- thwack thwack- thwack of somebody in the kitchen pounding caracoles to chewy, abalone-like tenderness. As far as I know, this sort of mollusk single-mindedness has not been equaled in the Los Angeles area since the Bahamian conch specialty joint down on Pico went out of business a decade ago.

Before lunch come French-fry basketsful of paper-thin sliced green plantains, tajadas , fried to a shattering crispness, like good, vaguely fruity potato chips. Tajadas de carne molida involves a bed of the fried plantains topped with cabbage slaw and a mound of a blandish ground-meat stew; tajadas de chicharrones includes the cabbage but replaces the beef with crunchy pieces of fried pigskin, like a Honduran version of the Nicaraguan vigoron . Baliadas are thick flour tortillas folded over a filling of pureed beans and thick Honduran cream.

Sopa de caracol is a spectacular bowl of soup--chowder really--with gentle broth, milky-white with coconut, slightly sweet, faintly aromatic of bananas and of the sea. In its tropical lushness, sopa de caracol seems almost less like the cooking of neighboring Central American countries than it does like some Southeast Asian soup, perhaps Thai, with many fewer chiles. In the broth are starchy slabs of potatoes, cassava and plantains; long-cooked carrots and bell peppers, and a great mound of sliced conch meat, which is chewy--though not excessively so--and has a sweet marine flavor far milder than that of a clam.

The other unusual soup here is tapado , also based on coconut milk but spicier, tinted red with chiles, and featuring chunks of Honduran “dried” beef, which gives the soup an astonishing complexity but whose gaminess can at first be off-putting. Arroz con pollo is an astonishing thing--closer to Cuban-Chinese fried rice than to a Mexican arroz con pollo --a bowl-shaped, delicious, slightly oily mountain of stuff, garnished with strips of grilled ham and American cheese.

If you decide to have dessert, pastel Hondureno is more or less like a slice of yellow birthday cake, vaca negra is a root-beer float, but arroz con leche is one of the best rice puddings around, rich, creamy, not too sweet, just the thing to top off a caracol afternoon.

Honduras Kitchen

2409 E. Slauson Ave., Huntington Park, (213) 582-9139. Open Thursday through Tuesday, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Closed Wednesday. Cash only. No alcohol. Lot parking. Takeout. Weekday lunch for two, food only, $8; dinner for two, food only, $10-$14.