Last week we brought news of chicken gizzards and livers. This week we bring tidings of beef legs and hoofs. And you thought the cast of “Survivor” ate exotic fare!
 She’s got the touch: Carolina Sanchez of Cazon Tropical Restaurant and Pupuseria prepares a Central American-style corn tortilla. |
Nope, it’s little ol’ Charlottesville that came one step closer to the United Nations of nosh when Cazon Tropical Restaurant and Pupuseria opened on January 7 in the Woodbrook Shopping Center. This place, owned by Juan Hernandez, serves Dominican, Salvadorian and Honduran cuisine and such tantalizing and well-traveled dishes as mondongo estilo centroamericano, or Central American-style beef soup made from said beef legs and hoofs, locreo de camerones, or Dominican-style shrimp rice and fried green plantains, and pollo con tajadas, or Honduran-style fried chicken with fried green bananas and coleslaw, all of which you can take out or enjoy at Cazon’s little café space. But manager and chef Carlos Palma says the house specialty is the pupusa, which is a Central American-style, handmade corn tortilla filled with chicken, pork, beans and/or cheese. Palma says this is the first pupusa place in town, and as a nine-year veteran cook from our local Outback Steakhouse, he’s probably been around long enough to know the poop on the pupu.
Palma is a native of Honduras, so we suspect the menu is pretty authentic. Pick up a pupusa for yourself to check it out.
Now if we could just get someone to serve fried brain sandwiches around here, we think we’d have a market for just about every part of the butchered animal, not to mention some pretty good grub to gross out your most xenophobic of relatives when they come to visit.
Déjeuner communiqué
Starting today, French bistro Zinc is open for lunch for good, and that is wonderful news for those of you who, like Restaurantarama, prefer to eat your croque monsieurs by noon, so there’s still plenty of time to work off the jambon and the béchamel before bed. Co-owner and chef Thomas Leroy reminds us that he and co-owner and chef Vu Nguyen “gave lunch a shot” late this past summer, but he says they didn’t market the mid-day munchies appropriately enough and didn’t receive a rousing response. Now, he says, “we have almost a year under our belts, and we are able to forecast better.” Zinc will serve lunch 11:30am-2pm Tuesday-Saturday.
As for the menu, Leroy says it will be a “toned-down version” of the evening fare, featuring some of the salads and soups from the “upper part” of the dinner menu, plus sandwiches.
As for how this almost 1-year-old W. Main Street establishment, which is located at the former, short-lived sites of Orchid and Station, is faring overall, Leroy says, “There have been great ups and downs.” He cites the popularity of Zinc’s Saturday afternoon televised soccer matches and Saturday night discothèque-style live music as part of those ups, and the continuing vortex of the Downtown Mall as the biggest down.
“I wish I could capture more of the audience that’s going Downtown,” he says.
We wish you could too, Thomas, so here’s a shout out to all of you Downtown Mall rats: Get off your behinds and walk the two-ish blocks to W. Main Street once in a while! If you lived in any major city, that would be less than the distance between your cubicle and the closest coffee stand, for goodness sake.
Quick bites
In brief, we bring news of two expanding empires. The first comes from the lord of Lord Hardwicke’s on Emmet Street: Owner Craig Dunn will open a second location of that establishment in Greene County in February. The second comes from reigning C-VILLE 20 member Karen Laetare, who owns Brix Market Place on Route 53 and Brix Terrace Café on Pantops. She’s been chosen to run the café planned for the new Monticello visitor center, which is scheduled for completion in November. More to come on these stories!
Got some restaurant scoop? Send tips to restaurantarama@c-ville.com or call 817-2749, Ext. 48.
