Pretty Pupusas

I'd gone all out and ordered a dinner that sounded insanely rich: pollo crema. The big bowl that arrived in front of me had a stewed chicken resting in a milky broth lightly seasoned with lime, onion and garlic. I pulled off pieces of the fork-tender bird and folded them in fresh flour tortillas, and it was one of the most heavenly ways I'd ever tasted the lowly fowl. Before I knew it, I was looking down on a bowl of bones.

Zach had warned me that Central American cooking is hardly haute cuisine, but the minute he took a sip of icy cantaloupe agua fresca and bit into a hot pupusa, he started waxing nostalgic about how authentic it was. And he was thrilled to see that El Quetzal offers traditional Central American breakfasts — even for lunch. "Now that's something I've missed over the years," he said. "These are the kinds of breakfasts you find everywhere in Guatemala City — even at McDonald's."

This standard Central American desayuno includes three fried eggs, a heap of long-simmered black beans, fried plaintains, a hunk of slightly salty farmer's cheese, hot tortillas and a little plastic cup of "table crema" — "You know it as crème fraîche," Zach told me.

When I ordered the bistek al gusto, Zach told me that it would taste like Salisbury steak. And it did. The grilled strips of skirt steak weren't the most tender I'd tasted, though they were smothered in a lovely sauce of peppers, onions and tomatoes. The dish hardly packed any heat, though I'd ordered it spicy. "What you think of as spicy isn't the same in Guatemala," Zach said, so I splashed a little hot-pepper sauce on it and ate the stewlike dish with tortillas and the rice steamed with kernels of yellow corn. It was fantastic, but far too much food for me to finish.

"I shouldn't have eaten so many pupusas," I confessed to Zach.

"In Guatemala, they think fat people are rich," he said.

After paying such a small price for so much food, I didn't just feel rich — and fat, for that matter. I really was.