San Sivar serves up fresh Salvadoran home cooking
Restaurante y Pupuseria Las San Sivar is the kind of place Jonathan Gold would have liked.
Gold, the longtime restaurant critic for LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, died last month of pancreatic cancer. He was 57.
Gold was the only food writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. I admired how he approached the Asian, African and Latin American restaurants of Los Angeles with deep curiosity and empathy. He championed small, familyrun restaurants where good flavours flourished.
“There can be a thousand different restaurants that are great in a thousand different ways,” Gold says in the 2015 documentary about him, City of Gold.
Toronto, like Los Angeles, is a city of the world, and San Sivar represents all that is good in Salvadoran home cooking.
The restaurant opened almost two years ago at a scruffy west-end intersection shared by a cheque cashing store, a vape shop and a gas station. “Washroom for customers only,” says the sign in the window.
The 26-seat interior is equally humble.
Plastic covers the tables. Walls are bare save for a plaque of El Salvador. Mounted high in one corner, a television broadcasts Spanish comedies. When the setting sun hits the west-facing windows, staff draw the vertical blinds.
Owner Evelin Roxana Garcia Orellana, 39, is a cook from San Salvador; the city’s nickname is San Sivar. Her restaurant does steady business all day, starting with mammoth three-egg breakfasts ($10) and ending past the posted 8 p.m. closing time as stragglers pop in for pupusas. On weekends, Spanishspeaking families work their way through massive bowls of cow feet-andtripe soup ($12). They cool the boiling broth by aerating each spoonful.
This soup, or at least the scaled-back weekday beef version ($12), shows a lot of care. The broth is intense in colour and flavour thanks to lots of bones and softened bits of beef shank. There is zero fat because the broth cools overnight to harden the fat, which is then discarded. Carrot, peeled yucca and corn cobs add a subtle sweetness.
Such food goes down easily. So do platters of grilled meats like the mixto ($18). Maybe not the steak that gives the jaw a workout, but one can get behind the delicious flattened chicken breast and the split shrimp touched with achiote. On the side are fried black beans, soft plantains, boiled rice and a fresh salad.
Then come the pupusas ($3), the stuffed tortillas El Salvador claims as its own. To like them, you have to appreciate the essential simplicity of masa harina, the corn meal also used in tamales, gorditas and arepas. Here, circles of dough are slapped together with pork, beans or cheese — or, better yet, all three — and griddled until soft yet blistered, with crisp edges. Each order brings a plastic bowl of coleslaw and squeeze bottles of hot sauce and tomato sauce.
One pupusa will sate a child, two a woman, three a man. The trick is to break off pieces by hand, eschewing cutlery. “You’re eating them like pancakes,” one diner teases another for using a knife and fork. Diners wash down the ground corn and stretchy white cheese with tall plastic cups of tart tamarind juice ($2) or milky horchata ($2) made from calabash seeds. There are no desserts at San Sivar.
A pupusa, Jonathan Gold once wrote, “is one of the perfect foods of the Americas, all ooze and heat and crunch, with a cool yet fiery cabbage salad as its inevitable accompaniment.” In remembering Gold, I also remember a couple of colleagues who recently left the Star (and remain alive): photographer Carlos Osorio, who recommended San Sivar to me, and food editor Jennifer Bain, who served readers the world.