by Leah Crisman, entertainment editor
The Centro American Restaurant and Pupuseria is a bit of an oddity in College Station. It isn’t Tex-Mex, it doesn’t specialize in fried chicken or massive burgers and it is definitely not geared towards trend-seeking high school and college students. However, if you strip away the sketchy location (between a tattoo parlor and a Stop-N-Go Food Mart) and the grocery store feel of the interior, there’s a vast array of heavenly Ecuadorian and El Salvadorian food at your salsa-splattered fingertips.
To begin, the service was stellar. The owners are almost always in attendance to give suggestions and assemble the food. It’s also rather novel to see the person taking orders step around a corner and start grilling chicken. There’s a definite mom-and-pop charm about the restaurant.
The tacos were excellent. Both the chicken tacos and the fajita beef tacos serve as a delicious reminder that a taco doesn’t need to be made by a prestigious chef for it to be excellent quality. There was no fussy fusion food here; just a simple taco made by people who know what they’re doing.
The watermelon juice (pictured left) was refreshing–and heavily endorsed by Yelp reviewers.
The food takes a fair bit of time, but there’s no shortage of things to look at while you’re waiting. An assortment of Central American foodstuffs takes up a couple rows of shelving, and they’re definitely worth glancing through. Chocolate-flavored fruit dip in a bag shares a shelf with a bacon-flavored puffed snack food christened “Bacorns.” Meanwhile, the El Salvadorian microwavable Chow Mein is only a little less unusual than the bottled cashew juice (shake well). If the specialty food doesn’t entice, the large TV above the cash register always has a novela or talk show playing–non-Spanish speakers need only listen to the music to get a feel for what is going on.
Centro America is still a rookie (it is only about two years old) and is not very ‘trendy’ per say, but here’s hoping it’s a fixture in College Station.
For more information, check out their Facebook page.
