El Salvadoreno — Restaurant in Duarte

The place was clean and the restaurant is definitely bigger than it looks from the outside. Staff was also friendly, and that's about it for the pros. You get chips and salsa from the beginning but the salsa is bland with a hit of heat at the end and the chips didn't help out the salsa at all, they were bland as well. Ordered 6 pupusas during the lunch hour and it took almost 40 minutes for them to get to our table. I would understand if the restaurant was busy and packed but the place was pretty much empty and there was only one party that ordered ahead of us. Once we finally got to dig in we quickly noticed that there was something off about these pupusas, something key was missing. I finally noticed that the pupusas had almost no grease, which if you have had good pupusas they tend to be dripping. The bland dry pupusa was just that throughout, I had to drown mine with the curtido to get some flavor going. The other members of my party didn't bother to finish they're good and I barely finished mine. None of this was aided by the watered down aguas frescas either. Finally the last nail in the coffin for me was the price, each pupusa was around 3 plus almost 3 dollars for each drink. Its not too expensive but definitely not worth what you get. I'm guessing they're other menu items are probably the better option since this place has a...

We came out to get food to go. The place has switched around from the last time we were here, not a bad look. We ordered 3 cheese pupusa, 2 chicharron and cheese and a chicharron and yucca plate, side of beans. 20 minute wait, that was fine. Got home and opened the bag... dove into the beans and immediately realized they were canned!!. Tasted like rosarita, so very disappointing! Usually their beans don't taste canned. I was pretty surprised, usually I love their beans. So on to the pupusas... those were fine. Nothing unusual and there sauce was good. Another disappointment was my chicharron plate with fried yucca. I kid you not, the space where the main portion goes, like right front and center, was filled with their yucca. Fried like french fries. The pork was 3 pieces in the left "side" portion, along with a salad and lemon and lime in the other side area! What??? I paid $15 for a plate full of fried yucca. Never again! Came all the way from Pasadena in traffic for a really bad plate of food and canned beans. If you dine in, the experience is somewhat different. I see posted pics of different proportion. Really...

UNBELIEVABLE! My parents and I have gone to El Salvadoreno at LEAST 3 times before. We all tasted the casamiento had gone BAD. We tell the waitress about it and she offers us re-fried beans instead. We agreed, but while she was in the kitchen we all had lost our appetite from the bad taste in our mouth. I quickly go to the kitchen to stop the cook WHEN I SEE HER SCRAPING OUR CASAMIENTO BACK INTO THE CONTAINER SHE GOT IT FROM. I ask her- are you putting the CASAMIENTO back into the container? She replies "Yes, you don't want it and it's still good." I told her - even if it was good, it was just on our plates that's DISGUSTING! So, what WE were eating was LEFTOVER?! She quickly begins to say it's trash! It's trash! At this point my parents see the commotion and couldn't believe what they did. My dad still paid for the drinks and platanos EVEN THOUGH we ate nothing...