Rincon Hondureño

HONDURAS 🇭🇳

COVID-19 UPDATE: The restaurant, which was completely takeout and delivery during most of the last year, is once again open for indoor dining. Its big booths are full of groups of friends and families.

From the outside as the name suggests, this does indeed look like a little Honduran nook, the corner of a block awash in the blue of the flag and painted with guaras rojas, the colorful national bird of the country. Inside that corner door, the inside has a lot more blue, a lot more scarlet macaws, and seven booths and a few tables ready to take customers.

Be warned though, that if those tables are even half full, there will be some waiting involved. The staff here works very hard, but the kitchen capacity just cannot keep up with big orders from multiple tables and takeout customers at once. On a couple recent visits, time was measured by how many songs the jukebox played on its own, something that happens about every 30 minutes.

But the jukebox is not so loud, and you could definitely do worse than sitting here for some time in the comfortable booths surrounded by pleasant scenes from Honduras on the walls and families enjoying themselves. Grab a bottle of banana-flavored Tropical soda or a glass of their wonderful jugo de guanábana and do not watch the time. Throw some money in if you do not like the automatic playlist.

Essential to any Honduran restaurant is of course the thick and fluffy flour tortillas that are served with meals and used as the wrapper of a baleada sencilla ($2.50, above). This staple in its most simple form includes just beans, some crema, and a sprinkle of cheese. This is one of the tastiest in town.

Two more of those beautiful tortillas are also served with breakfasts like huevos rancheros ($10, above), which are never so much about the eggs in Honduras as they are about the complements. Every component that surrounds eggs at breakfast must also include those three ingredients from inside a baleada as well as fried sweet plantains and a nice wedge of avocado.

Lunches like Honduran-style carne asada ($13.50, below) come with beans, cheese, and avocado as well, as well as a light marinade that is an immediate transport to Central America. This can be cut into slices and thrown into tortillas or eaten on its own, either way it is all extremely pleasing.

Because Los Angeles is home to so many people originally from El Salvador, and since the foods of each of these two countries are enjoyed in the other, the menu also has a page of Salvadoran staples and soups, if you are in the mood for pupusas or sopa de gallina indio on a visit here.

Honduran soups are well represented too, most days you can find sopa de caracol, a conch soup so famous it even has its own ballad. Also worth a try is the sopa de camarón ($14.50, below) which is filled with large, fresh shrimp and vegetables.

The broth is lovely, made from the shells and heads of the shrimp. It benefits from a squirt or two of lime to add a sour smack and can also be heated up with their intensely spicy salsa. More flour tortillas can come with this, or you get fried sweet plantains or tostones.

Beloved throughout most of Central American is the shredded beef salad known as salpicón ($12.50, below), which is prepared here with cilantro, radish, onion, and lime and served at room temperature. It is an especially good choice for extra hot days.

And the menu only goes onward and upward from there. Exploring it all would take dozens of visits, something that some of your fellow customers have probably been doing by the looks of it.

📍 1654 W. Adams Blvd., Adams-Normandie, South Los Angeles

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