By Julieta Chiquillo
The Dallas Morning NewsPeople say money can't buy happiness.
Lies. In Oak Cliff, I can get it for $4 before tax.
That's the price of two rice-flour pupusas with beans and cheese at La Campiña Salvadoreña. If I let go, I can wash down the pupusas with cashew apple juice for $2 extra.
Sure, I had run into pupuserías before in other corners of Dallas, but this place is special. It's a time machine to a childhood steeped in syrupy drinks, where memories smell of roasted tomatoes on a comal and taste like crunchy snacks and velvety beans.
I found La Campiña Salvadoreña along Davis Street by accident when I was heading back to the office after an interview. Even though there are more than 73,000 Salvadorans in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, it's not every day that I stumble across a pupusa, so I had to stop.
If you don't know what pupusas are, let me explain. They're thick tortillas made of corn or rice flour and filled with cheese and beans or pork. You let them sizzle over a comal or griddle and then tear them with your hands as the melted stuffing escapes.
They're cheap, filling and delicious. In short, I say they're God's gift to humanity.
I ordered my pupusas to-go and sat down to wait. Then I noticed the little store I was in.
I found the Chocomelher melting chocolate used in my childhood home to make frozen bananas. Also, the popular Diana brand snacks: the Alboroto caramel popcorn that I used buy in school, the Platanitos or plantain chips that my dad devoured during weekends at the beach and the Yuquitas or yucca chips that my parents send from El Salvador because they know my brother loves them.
I even spotted the spice mix or "relajo" that my mom uses to prepare turkey salsa, a recipe that gives our Christmas the aroma of roasted tomatoes and toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds, bay leaves, oregano and guajillo chile.
Also in stock, of course, is my beloved Kolashampan soda, an orange-colored concoction that is a staple at children's birthday parties. I still don't know what flavor it's supposed to be.
Here, at La Campiña, refried beans are frijoles colochos. They're red silk beans, not pinto or black beans. The curtido — our version of coleslaw that accompanies pupusas — is made with traditional pineapple vinegar.
The fried plantains, served with beans and cream, are so tender and sweet that one of my colleagues thought they were bananas.
When we move far from home, sometimes we fall back on substitutes to conjure a favorite dish. But Iris Chicas, owner of La Campiña, said she's devoted to authentic flavors, imported from El Salvador.
"People like it because they come, they eat and they leave with a little bit of El Salvador," said owner Iris Chicas.
She is a niece of one of the owners of Gloria's, the fancy chain of Tex-Mex restaurants that has given Dallas a taste of Salvadoran cuisine. But La Campiña — which also has locations in Arlington and North Dallas — is closer to the El Salvador I know, where you eat pupusas with a hand wrapped around a Coca-Cola, not a guava margarita.
Here your meal is served in a simple dining area with walls the color of mango. Flat TV screens play Mexican telenovelas, a detail faithful to Salvadoran daily life and as predictable as the fact that the star-crossed lovers stay together in the end.
This place is Salvadoran down to the security bars on the windows and the door, standard features in a country where crime is rampant.
Oak Cliff has thieves, too, and La Campiña has been burglarized a few times. That's why the bars are there. But things have gotten better in recent years, Chicas said. She points to the rebirth of the Bishop Arts District. It's been good for her business.
But you don't have to go to a fine restaurant to enjoy a feast around here. I ate like a queen in the home I left behind, and La Campiña brings it back to me in little pieces. Nothing tastes better than a good memory.
