L.A. is ready for an upscale Salvadoran restaurant. So where is it?

Over a plate of pupusas in Historic South-Central, Kelly Love, an L.A. fashion stylist, recalled growing up in Silver Lake in the ‘90s and feeling like she had to hide her Salvadoran identity to avoid getting bullied.

“I remember being little, I would have to be like, ‘I’m Mexican’ so I wouldn’t get jumped,” said Love, who is also Honduran-Chinese.

Love attended King middle and Marshall high schools, two emblematic public campus names in the core of Los Angeles. Silver Lake wasn’t what it is now, she said. It was much more Mexican and Central American, and a lot rougher. “You had to hide your identity, ’cause then you’d get punked.”

That memory is one that many Salvadoran Angelenos might relate to. The Latino population in L.A. is overwhelmingly Mexican, with Salvadorans being the second largest but still much smaller group overall (roughly 74% versus 9% in 2025, including Orange County, according to Pew Research Center). For decades, being Salvadoran meant being identified as a refugee diaspora escaping a war, and later, an association grew with the street gangs that formed as a result of the displacement. In short, it was a mine field of survival and marginalization.

Grilled half Cornish hen topped with chile-pickled daikon radish. (Eric Valle / For The Times) But something has shifted since the hardcore 1980s and 1990s. Salvadoran identity, culture, literature and cuisine have become engines of pride and community in Los Angeles at the hands of first-generation Salvadoran Americans. Some have dubbed the whole moment a renaissance.

The reclamation of the once derogatory term “Salvi” is a feature of this change, and so is the freedom of movement back and forth between L.A. and the familial homeland. Love said she spent a transformative three months in El Salvador in 2023, calling it a privilege to steep herself in her heritage.

“Within the last 10 years, it’s cool to be proud of who you are. You can rep the Salvadoran flag now, the team uniform,” said Love. “Now I feel like it’s trending.”

That sense of a fundamental shift struck me hard some nights before at Leña, a Boyle Heights pop-up founded by chef Jimmy Reyes and his wife and partner Luisa Reyes that highlights modern Salvadoran cooking.

It happened two Friday nights ago on the sidewalk outside the second location of the café Picaresca on East 8th Street, a special end-of-summer dinner with wines selected by Andrea Onofre of Beaune Imports. Reyes, aided by Jared Wang of Chifa, set up his almond wood grill nearby, while the familiar sounds of urban L.A. — car alarms, hot rods — rounded out the scene.

Like many other omnivores out there, I’ve lived in L.A. long enough to form a separate stream in my brain for the distinct qualities of Salvadoran culture, social history and foods. Leña, like the celebrated Oakland restaurant Popoca, takes this culinary landscape to another level, applying elevated techniques to a cuisine that isn’t naturally synonymous with fine-dining in the California mainstream.

We sat family-style among a collage of Salvadoran Americans and diners representing every other Latin American Angeleno mixture you could think of. The cross-conversation, let me tell you, was life-affirming. As the vibes bloomed, I began feeling somehow adopted, and maybe transformed. I remember thinking, in a diner’s fever dream during the meal’s climax — Am I a little bit Salvi now?

I am not Salvadoran. I’ve never traveled there. It was a chaotic thought. Yet I felt fully welcomed and embraced in a way that’s unmistakable, as we enjoyed the multi-course meal that focused entirely on the one-of-a-kind Salvadoran ingredient loroco.

The entire tasting menu at Leña’s recent pop-up centered on the Salvadoran ingredient loroco, including masa-fried squash blossoms with loroco and relajo crema. (Eric Valle / For The Times) That’s the earthy flower bud that comes in standard pupusas of queso con loroco. Reyes amped up the flower to heights possibly never before seen. He made a loroco hummus, masa-fried squash blossoms with loroco and a relajo crema, plus grilled half Cornish hen topped with bits of chile-pickled daikon radish. Loroco beurre blanc sauce went over just-grilled branzino. The chef even incorporated it into the dessert: grilled zucchini bread with smoked crema ice cream and loroco oil.

Reyes’ aunt, Cándida de la Luz, molded the tortillas, which in the Salvadoran style are pudgier, almost as thick as a gordita.

Leaving the dinner after nearly four hours, I felt I had witnessed a moment befitting the ambitions of a diaspora that can no longer be defined by the traumas and tragedies of decades past. We need more of it.

Reyes was born in L.A. to a Mexican father and a mother who escaped El Salvador during the brutal civil war, which left 75,000 dead. The conflict had claimed the life of his grandfather. Reyes was drawn to the kitchen in high school, worked in catering, and eventually earned a job cooking at Nancy Silverton’s Mozza on Melrose Avenue.

“I always knew I wanted to do something with Salvadorian food, I just didn’t know how to bring it into existence,” Reyes said.

Then he came across figures like Karla Tatiana Vasquez, author of the James Beard Award-nominated cookbook “SalviSoul,” as well as Popoca chef Anthony Salguero. He’d found a cohort of inspiration. Leña launched in August 2024.

“Everything I do at Leña is a mirror to how I grew up seeing in the pueblo in El Salvador,” said Reyes, who went back and forth, soaking up his family’s cooking traditions in the department of Chalatenango. “I purposefully do it family style [because] … I don’t know how to say it in English … Like, if one eats, we all eat.”

Jimmy Reyes, with Jared Wang assisting, at a grill set up for the Leña pop-up at the Picaresca cafe on 8th Street in Boyle Heights. (Daniel Hernandez / Los Angeles Times) Halfway through the evening, someone sitting across the table from me remarked with laughter that talk of “tensions” between Mexicans and Salvadorans in L.A. is totally senseless since “we have so many babies together.”

This is not incorrect: I’ve met more half Mexican, half Salvadoran, or half other Central American Angelenos, than I could count over the past 25 years. Some might say it’s one of the most emblematic “mixed” Latino statuses there is in L.A.

Incidentally, Vasquez, who contributes to The Times as a writer, sat across from me as well. Read her visceral crónica of the dinner in her newsletter Un Poco de Relajo, in which she calls loroco the “perfect symbol for the Salvadoran diaspora.”

“Salvadoran people … somos bien sentimentales [we’re so sentimental],” Vasquez told me this week. “We are swept away by our own romance, to this angst and pain we have, our desperate pursuit of wanting to touch home, and validating our own experiences.”

But Vasquez cautioned against being overly sentimental about how much the Salvadoran experience has been accepted and adopted by the greater patchwork of Latino Los Angeles. In social terms, Central Americans and Mexicans in L.A. have lived shoulder-to-shoulder for generations, and shared similar barriers, achievements, and hardships. The scale and context, of course, are vastly different. Vasquez said other Latinos will sometimes still shift uncomfortably when she reveals her background.

“I want to believe that diners are smart, because I do have evidence of that, and I also have evidence of the opposite,” she said. “It means going in with a certain attitude of trust.”

So why don’t we have a bricks-and-mortar modern Salvadoran American restaurant in Los Angeles, home to the diaspora’s largest concentration in the U.S.? Beyond our abundance of pupusa street stalls, most Salvadoran restaurants in L.A. are mom-and-pop shops, or local chains that cater to families. I know of at least one legacy sit-down Salvadoran restaurant with an attached bar that sits slightly above casual: Jaraguá on Beverly Boulevard. The pan con pavo is excellent.

Oakland has Popoca. Where’s ours? Reyes said he’s never received interest from potential investors to turn his pop-up into a permanent kitchen, but also hasn’t sought it out actively.

Popoca in Oakland is chef-owner Anthony Salguero’s modern Salvadoran American restaurant. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times) “I think that L.A. diners have a real dialed-in desire for tasting the world. You wouldn’t live in L.A. if that were not true,” Vasquez said. “I think they’re ready.”

But, she added, “the experiences of investment and opportunity are not the same for Central Americans. … I don’t know that the investors that can make that happen have the confidence that people will show up for it.”

For his part, Reyes said he never understood the talk of Mexican-Salvadoran tensions. “I’m both, I’m the love child,” he laughed.

He said Leña is about showing that Salvadoran cuisine is far richer than pupusas. And he yearns to return there. “Every time I go, I have such a great time, there’s so much beautiful culture and cuisine in El Salvador, and I’m still learning about it. … It’s safer now. But that’s a whole different topic. Yes it’s safer, but at what expense?”

Yes, a topic for later, with the current right-wing tilt of Salvadoran politics. Meanwhile, here in L.A., something is happening with this particular diaspora that is worth watching and embracing.

“There is a small but mighty group of people who are working on” expanding the horizons of Salvadoran culinary excellence, Vasquez said. “There is so much to see of what Salvadorans can do. I’m just excited to be a witness to it, and aún más, to be someone who can experience it and be a part of that history by writing it down.

There is a boom in Salvadoran literature in the early 21st century. The most celebrated new author is arguably Javier Zamora (“Unaccompanied,” “Solito”). I also follow poet Christopher Soto here in L.A., plus Raquel Gutiérrez, author of “Brown Neon.” And the trailblazing works of Rubén Martínez will always be foundational.

Here are my two main Salvadoran book recommendations for L.A.’s omnivorous readers to know in 2026. Start with “The SalviSoul Cookbook,” a beautiful volume that centers the women cooks Vasquez has learned from. Last year I wrote about the book’s groundbreaking Beard nomination.

Another essential: the stark memoir “Unforgetting” by Roberto Lovato, a San Francisco native who spent years doing street-level advocacy for the Central American community in L.A.’s MacArthur Park area. I wrote about Lovato’s book in 2020. “Donald Trump really persuaded me to come out about my militancy,” he told me. “Because I really want young and older people to really think, ‘What does revolution mean now?’ ”

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Daniel Hernandez is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he served as Food editor from 2022 to 2026. He is a two-time nominee for a James Beard Media Award and the recipient of the inaugural Nell Minow Award for Cultural Criticism from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.