La Esperanza Restaurant & Bakery — Restaurant in Long Beach

The most fantastic, fresh, and wholesome meals and baked goods come from this restaurant. From the moment you sit down you’re welcomed and cared for like family with a plate of mini tortillas and beans to dip. We ordered the pupusa special (2 pupusas with rice, beans, and curtido.) with fresh Jamaica. Hard to overstate the care that went into these enormous savory pupusas. I got the veggie pupusa and the bean and cheese pupusas I added loroco to each one. Our server read back our order and she was careful to honor small requests. There are so many reasons why the thoughtful touches of these dishes were delicious. The veggie pupusa had vegetables that had been pre-charred so there was a mix of freshness and smokiness to the flavors. The generous portion of curtido was served in a glass with tongs and it had a lovely but not-too-spicy kick of jalapeños. If you like spicy, you can ask for their hot sauce which is scratch made, in house. When you receive the bill they have homemade candies on tiny spoons like a lollipop. I can’t say enough about the generosity of this restaurant, they are truly serving love with every bite. I can’t...

I’m a frequent customer of this place. I order chuchitos and champurrado on a daily basis. Today’s order came wrong, one of the chuchitos was pork and not chicken as I requested. I noticed Laura the server was very busy and stressed, so I didn’t mind coming back to request an exchange. When I started drinking the champurrado, I noticed small pieces of plastic film in it. After finding the third piece of plastic film in my champurrado I decided to come back and tell Laura about my finding. I pointed out that I just wanted my money back for the champurrado. She inspected the champurrado and said that there was no plastic in it. I even pointed out the piece with a toothpick for her to see, but still, she decided to tell me there was no plastic in there. I originally came to request my money back and hear an apology, instead, her statement makes me look like a liar. In addition to that, she refused to hear my complaint, and I’m citing her words: “I’m too busy”. As a customer, this is disrespectful, that you can’t even take a minute to understand why your customers are not happy. For this reason, I’m not buying at this...

First time here with my brother. We both ordered a plato of pupusas. My brother got 1 pork and 1 chicken. I got 1 chorizo and 1 chipilin. They all also had cheese filling as well. Food was good. I'm willing to try new things so that's why I went for chipilin which I'd never heard of. The waiter described it as a green that tastes something like peanuts. I guess that's pretty accurate, but I wasn't crazy about it and the texture was kinda weird. There were some pretty stiff pieces but overall it seemed a bit like ong choi. The condiments and rice and beans were all good. Not the best neighborhood but the place was nice inside and service was good. It's a small place and just one waiter. But to be so slow that day, we had to wait quite a while for our food - nearly half an hour. And the prices were kinda high for...