Esquina Catracha Restaurante

HONDURAS 🇭🇳

Many times eating Central American food can be an underwhelming experience here in the city. The cuisine definitely has its own characters, even between countries, but usually does not have the flare of the more famous Mexican or South American cuisines that surround it geographically. Restaurants tend to cater to diaspora and have generalized menus focusing on the easier to cook items.

In this atmosphere, it was thrilling to have a meal at Esquina Catracha Restaurante in Union City, NJ. The restaurant technically shares its menu with El Salvador, but it is Honduran through and through. The interior is amazing, completely white and blue like the flag, full of football jerseys of the national team and its big bold "H" crest. Structural poles are painted blue and white, all the chairs upholstered with the same stripes from the flag. Cabinets are full of t-shirts and tchotchkes that tourists in the Bay Islands would buy before coming home, but might also interest homesick Catrachos.

If Honduras is able to qualify for the next World Cup in 2018, this place will definitely make our list of venues best for watching.

Before the plates come out, complimentary chips, beans, and cheese.

The typical breakfast plates looked so inviting, exact replicas of the simple hearty meals we were craving each morning during travels in Honduras. The staples here are important, and forgetting one would upset the balance of a Honduran meal. The eggs come flanked with beans, cheese, and tortillas, as well as a slice of avocado.

We were here for lunch though, so everyone ordered their own personal baleada con todo ($3.50, below), the flagship culinary creation of Honduras. The flour tortilla made here was slightly thicker than most and luxuriously fried for a thin crispiness around the pillowy center. "Con todo" means with everything, and that means beans, cheese, cream, meat, and egg. A side of avocado was ordered for the full splurge.

On its own, the cuisine is not very spicy, but pickled peppers come standard on every table to be added to anything as desired. Also green and red salsas from Guatemala were available.

Perfect for sharing and getting the full experience of what a typical Honduran kitchen makes daily, try the plato típico hondureño ($16.50, below). Centered around the rice sculpture, the typical platter includes carne asada, Honduran crema, a block of queso, chismol and avocado, and fried sweet plantains.

Carne asada can be one of those underwhelming things described earlier, but here it was better than any other Central American restaurant in the area, tender and full of flavor and less tough than usual. The excellent crema and queso is used in both of these dishes, but like a Honduran I could never get enough of these.

This section of Union City is unique in that it is an almost exclusively Central American enclave with most residents with roots in El Salvador. The menu probably offers Salvadoran cuisine for this reason, but we suggest sticking to the other side of the menu like most of the customers coming here.

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UNION CITY New Jersey

2319 Bergenline Avenue