NORTH CENTER — A family is bringing its love of Salvadoran and other Central American culinary traditions to North Center.
The menu at Pupuseria el Centroamericano, 4064 N. Lincoln Ave., features Salvadoran dishes highlighted by pupusas. It’s the latest venture from Rina Meza, whose family has owned and operated restaurants in Chicago and the suburbs for decades.
“It’s a tradition,” Meza said in Spanish. “My mother and my older sister taught me, and my mother learned from my grandmother. And now I have two daughters who learned how to cook from me and are helping me here.”
Meza said her daughter, Sintia Ortega, is her “right hand” and serves as the restaurant’s general manager, which allows her to focus on the kitchen.
“It’s very generational,” Ortega said. “And this restaurant is bringing a little bit of our home to the city.”
The restaurant’s signature dish is the pupusa, a Salvadoran specialty similar to a griddle cake or flatbread that’s made with corn or rice flour and stuffed with cheese and other fillings, Ortega said.
“Just like the taco is the dish of Mexico, pupusas are the dish of El Salvador,” Ortega said. “And ever since I can remember, there’s always been positive feedback from customers that the pupusas my mother makes are better than the ones in El Salvador.”
Meza discovered that the former Don Pedro Mexican restaurant was for sale in November and closed on the property a few months later. After minor renovations, she opened her pupuseria in January.
The family previously had restaurants including El Rinconcito Hispano #1 in Uptown, El Rinconcito Hispano #2 in suburban Des Plaines, Pupuseria & Restaurant El Cuscatleco in Albany Park and, most recently, El Salvadoreño in suburban Mount Prospect.
Ortega’s parents ran the show for most of the time the family has been in the restaurant business. But the couple took a break from the business after her father, Marcos Ortega, became ill around 2016, Ortega said.
“My dad was always the front man, the one who did the finances and was the waiter,” Ortega said. “My mother was the back person in the kitchen, but they were always a duo.”
Meza opened the Mount Prospect restaurant in 2018, with Ortega stepping in to help her mother. After her father’s health took another turn, the family decided to close that business, Ortega said.
“It was a surprise when my mom came across the listing for this restaurant in North Center,” Ortega said.
The mother-and-daughter team at Pupuseria el Centroamericano is the latest in the family’s long tradition of mothers, sisters and daughters sharing a love of their culture’s food, Ortega and Meza said.
“My aunts and grandmothers all had their own businesses. And even before that, in our home country, they’d sell food at local markets that’d you’d probably consider flea markets,” Meza said.
These markets have dining halls, called “comedors,” where people can grab a bite to eat while shopping. Meza’s family had multiple comedors that used charcoal-fired earthen stoves, she said.
“My aunt had like eight of those stoves and they’d cook beans, platanos fritos. They made everything over the fire,” Meza said.
As soon as Meza was old enough to help, she started working at her older sister’s market stall. She learned the dishes while studying to become a dentist, Meza said.
But due to the Salvadoran Civil War, Meza and her family left their home in the 1980s to seek safety in the United States, she said.
“Since I arrived, I had the idea to have a restaurant showcasing El Salvadoran food,” Meza said.
Meza initially lived in California and quickly realized there was too much competition there for this kind of restaurant. About 12 years later, she visited Chicago and saw that there were a lot of Central American families but not many restaurants catering to them.
“There was a lot of Mexican and Puerto Rican food, but not Salvadoran or Honduran, nothing like that,” Meza said.
This led to Meza’s decision to move to Chicago in 1993 to open her first restaurant with her husband in 1997, she said.
“I promised a friend back then I’d open a restaurant in Chicago. And this is now my sixth restaurant,” Meza said.
Pupuseria el Centroamericano is open daily from 11 a.m.-8:30 p.m.
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