El Tamarindo, Washington, D.C.

Saturday evening, Ryan and I had been up in the Takoma neighborhood near Walter Reed Army Medical Center helping our friend Robert with a yard sale. Once the last box of unsold goodies was stored in the basement, we limped off to dinner at El Tamarindo Restaurant, Robert's favorite Salvadorean place in Tacoma.

El Tamarindo reminds me of a bustling family-owned restaurant that's clean, but not fancy or decorated at all. It's a sister restaurant of a place of the same name in Adams-Morgan. There was a mixed crowd Saturday night with many tables of Spanish speaking families, as well as other non-Hispanic patrons; a community dinner meeting conducted in Spanish was going on in the basement dining room.

We started with some Salvadorean appetizers. Ryan got a crab and shrimp quesadilla that was thick with white, traditional cheese and served with sour cream and yummy guacamole, and the piece I sampled was delicious.


Robert and I both had pupusas, traditional food made in Central American for thousands of years, that are rather like two thin cornmeal pancakes put together around a filling and then weighted and fried together. I had a simple pupusa de queso with the white cheese in between. Robert had two pupusas—cheese, I think—plus a little bowl of curtido, a sort of pickled cabbage and hot pepper slaw topped with tomato sauce that is a common pupusa accompaniment.


For main courses, Robert had the beef chimichanga. It looked like they had cooked a whole Sunday chuck roast, shredded it, and stuffed his tortilla with fragrant, juicy beef. It had been pan fried after rolling instead of deep fried, and that, of course, is a much healthier way to prepare chimis. It came with rice and a large salad on the plate.


Ryan had "trios enchiladas," a beef, a chicken, and a cheese enchilada platter. It had been scattered with even more white cheese and garnished with big dollops of sour cream and guacamole.



My dinner choice was the El Tamarindo Special, a house special starring a whole fried sea bass and accompanied with several large shrimp and some crab in a rich tomato cream sauce. It was delicious. It also came with rice and salad, the salad dressed in a lightly sweet dressing reminiscent of poppy seed dressing but without the poppy seeds.


After all this food, Robert and I were stuffed, but Ryan opted to have some flan for dessert.



El Tamarindo is a nice find. It has great, flavorful, authentic Salvadorean food at very, very reasonable prices. I'm going to have to make a point to try their Adams-Morgan location, as well.