Adios, Restaurante y Pupuseria - the empty storefront on February 13, 2011
I was driving through Silver Lake the other day when I saw something I’d expected to see eventually, but hoped I wouldn’t: an empty storefront at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Hyperion Avenue where a tiny Salvadoran pupuseria had stood for years, tucked between an upscale gelateria and a dentist office.
It was a little closet of a place, marked only with an awning reading “Restaurante y Pupuseria,” which in recent years had been updated from a lighter color to a hipper black, perhaps to blend in with the adjacent gelateria’s dark color scheme. Its passing seems to have gone largely unnoticed. Searching for an obituary of some kind, I found only a mention in Urban Spoon, which posted a simple notice advising “Closed: Pupuseria.” I called the dentist’s office next door and they told me that it closed about a month ago, and that the space is being prepared for another restaurant. A German place, they thought.
As tiny and insignificant as the little pupuseria might have been, I’d been watching it for years, and not only because I loved its steaming pupusas. To me, it represented one of the last remaining traces of a long ago Silver Lake that I remember fondly, a working class neighborhood that was home to a thriving Latino immigrant community, including my family. A few of the old Latino businesses hang on, though they seem increasingly out of place.
