Eating toward a sense of place at Honduras Kitchen

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

Just about all you need to know about Honduras is included in its 13th Floor Elevators-style coat of arms: dangling cornucopia stuffed with fruit and flowers, verdant hills smashed open by miners, and an idyllic seascape frame a pair of castle towers and a perfectly arched rainbow. So even if you’re not familiar with the country’s cuisine, you can trust that the coat of arms doesn’t lie: Honduras, and its tropical food, aims for the utopic as much as it does the hearty and exotic.

Squeezed in along Fourth Street just past Cherry, Honduras Kitchen is a nondescript little building picked out only by its blue awnings. And this theme carries on inside, where slabs of maroon-colored walls are chased by white molding and edged above with a lemon ceiling. Art is sparse and so are the fluorescent lights overhead. But Honduras Kitchen is set up perfectly for events. At its center is an island-style bar that doesn’t quite seem operational, but anchors the place nonetheless. Wrapped around the bar is a ton of space that, with tables stacked out of the way, could easily become a dance floor—the restaurant’s PA system and reggaeton on repeat are constant reminders of that.

Whether or not that’s enticing is up to preference, but Honduras Kitchen’s food is what will pull you in. Use the menu as a quick primer: lots of rice, beans, plantains, meat and a number of coconut-based soups. Of all that, it’s the sopa de caracol—conch soup—that Honduras Kitchen takes the most pride in.

For many, knowledge of conch is either nonexistent or lifted straight from the pages of Lord of the Flies. But at Honduras Kitchen, the marine snail is ripped away from any high-minded symbolism and served swimming in a coconut milk broth with green and yellow plantains, ripe bananas and shards of onion. The conch meat tastes like any other shelled creature scooped from the sea, though it does have a chewy texture that can be a bit off-putting between bites of plantain. As a whole, the soup is consistently interesting: a cool coconut pool that comes off like a mild Thai curry.

A better choice, however, is the restaurant’s traditional dishes of chicken and beef. The pollo frito, for example, is excellent—a few lightly fried hunks topped with chismol, a fresh salsa familiar to fans of pico de gallo. On the side is a hearty slop of beans and some rice. You get your choice for a third side, but this is an easy one: sweet plantains. The restaurant offers a few different varieties of plantains, so make sure you pick carefully: you want the charred spears grilled to a dark caramel brown, the insides so sweet and gooey they could pass as banana pudding.

The bistek encebollado, grilled strips of beef sautéed with onions and peppers, is excellent as well. Although the dish isn’t as exotic as some of the restaurant’s other offerings, it’s still a great plate, the tender bits of beef working as a perfect filling for the accompanying tortillas. And if you’re looking for a combination of just about everything Honduras Kitchen cooks up, go in and split the parrillada de la casa, a platter of pork chops, steak, shrimp, Honduran chorizo, tortillas, plantains and rice and beans.

There are a number of ways to wash all this down, too. There’s Honduran beer (order the Port Royal) and tropical-flavored sodas to start. A word of caution, though: the sodas are a bit sweeter than their American counterparts. The banana soda, for instance, bubbles with that kind of radioactive flavor found only in artificial banana candies, which makes it a bit overwhelming for normal consumption, but surprisingly appropriate when it runs past a bite of plantain.

After your initial visit to Honduras Kitchen, you’ll start to get a feel for Honduran cuisine—simple and hearty, complex and tropical. Head back again and you’ll truly be eating toward a sense of place, spooning up delicious bits of the Central American land through its cuisine. Also, make sure to grab a seat under the Honduran coat of arms—it’s the best way to connect all those dots.

HONDURAS KITCHEN 1909 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90802 | 562.624.8849 | WED-SUN 10AM-10PM | FOOD FOR TWO $20-40 | BEER, WINE | CASH ONLY

Tags: conch, Food, honduran, honduras kitchen, Long Beach, sopa de caracol