Home Is Where the Tacos Are
Adams Morgan Market Lets Customers Satisfy Street-Food Cravings

By Eliza Barclay
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 1, 2009

In most Latin American capitals, you can't make it a block without stumbling across a street food vendor: a lone boy on a corner guarding a tall, metal pot of steaming tamales, or maybe an elderly señora peeping between jars of granola and guavas inside a juice stand.

I lived in Mexico City from 2004 to 2007, and I survived on such encounters. When my weekend would turn into a patchwork of errands, sometimes a vague emptiness in my stomach cried out for just a taco or two until the next full-fledged meal.

Since returning to Washington, I've mourned the scarcity of street corner antojitos (Spanish for "little cravings"), but I recently found a place to get my fix in Adams Morgan, in a park that was once the turf of pigeons patrolling for scraps. Mi Tierra ("My Homeland"), a new outdoor street food and craft market in Unity Park at Columbia Road and Champlain Street NW, is an idyll of antojitos from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Argentina, plus bigger plates for bigger appetites. For weekend prowlers whose hunger outpaces their budget, it's a strong match.

Street food is certainly in vogue nowadays, with upscale restaurants such as Oyamel touting its charms, but the dishes of Mi Tierra evoke a simpler reality. It's the hearty food eaten by day laborers and Latino families nostalgic for home: spiced meats, pupusas, tamales, plantains, chili peppers and even a vegetarian mole.

For people such as Giovanni Hernandez, who was born in the United States, the market is a way to connect to the culture of his parents' homeland. "The food is delicious," Hernandez said as he loaded up on a big plate of carne asada, rice and tortillas. "I love the food of El Salvador." On the recent Sunday that Hernandez visited, the market was busy with new neighbors, curious passersby and longtime clients of the vendors.

The market, which goes from Friday morning until Sunday evening year-round, was born out of an effort to help vendors who lack the capital to open a restaurant by cutting through licensing bureaucracy. It also represents another step in the city's efforts to expand street-food options after ending a long moratorium on new licenses.

According to Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Bryan Weaver, Adams Morgan hosted dozens of street vendors in the 1980s and 1990s before the moratorium started thinning the ranks. Many of Mi Tierra's 18 vendors once sold food illegally on the sidewalk in front of the Sacred Heart Church by 16th Street and Park Road NW and were occasionally fined by the police. Last year, frustrated vendors and their supporters in the Latino community went to the D.C. Office on Latino Affairs in search of help. Mercedes Lemp, the office's director, proposed a street market licensed as a farmers market and agreed to finance the International Migrants' Development Fund, an Adams Morgan nonprofit organization, to manage the project.

"There was no way for them to become legal vendors under the system we had," Lemp said.

To participate, vendors have to attend weekly classes on such topics as accounting, food safety and small-business management. Nitza Segui Albino, chief executive of the development fund, says she hopes the classes will help the vendors to eventually work in restaurants or open their own.

Patricia Cruz is one such vendor with dreams and certainly the culinary talent to one day move beyond the market. Cruz hails from Mexico City and hangs a Mexican flag from the corner of her tent. She rotates among more than eight taco fillings (four every day of the market), serving them between slightly charred white corn tortillas. (Experienced taco eaters know that doubling up the tortillas helps keep precious chunks from slipping out the ends or piercing the delicate dough.)

Cruz's Friday centerpiece is carnitas: marinated pork cut into chunks and then baked. Come back on Saturday for chilies rellenos, dark green poblano peppers stuffed with cheese, then battered and fried; or costilla, braised ribs in a spicy morita chili pepper sauce. On Sunday, don't miss tinga de pollo, shredded chicken in chipotle sauce. She also serves tilapia ceviche with avocado atop a crispy tostada.

Word of her tacos has swiftly gotten around the Mexican community, and at $2 apiece, it's easy to see why. Gringos also crowd around her, many of them unearthing rusty high school Spanish for the cause of a good taco or for a taste of her fresh salsas: green, red and orange made from chili de arbol, which will blaze the tongue.

On one side of Cruz, Rosa Elena Meléndez, under her own white tent, specializes in the "sanguich," or pan con pollo ($6): chicken stuffed inside a large submarine roll and topped with tomato salsa, cucumber and watercress, accompanied by a hard-cooked egg. It's a massive plate of food.

On the other side is Isabel Guevara, who wears a traditional Salvadoran frilly apron and sells particularly piquant taquitos and pupusas ($1.25). Her taquitos are made with chicken, onions and peppers and are rolled tight into small cylinders before she plunges them into a deep fryer. Try one with a pupusa stuffed with greasy, savory chicharron and topped with cabbage and a tomato salsa.

Some in the neighborhood may know Francisca Ventura, set up beside Guevara, as the "mango lady" because she used to sit on Columbia Road during the summer selling small bags of sliced mangoes drenched in chili powder. "Thanks to God they gave us this spot, because I never got ahead there," Ventura said. "It's better to do something with permission than always be hiding."

Today, Ventura still sells the bags of mangoes for $2 but also has imported foods from Central America: cheese, cookies and dried red silk beans, which when cooked and pureed are smooth as silk. On a recent Saturday, an acquaintance dropped by with brilliantly colored crabs and sardines, both reportedly fresh off the plane from El Salvador. Ventura sold the sardines for $3 per half pound, while the crabs were $20 a bushel. Ventura recommends preparing a soup with the crabs, using a base of shrimp broth, oregano and black pepper.

The Argentine tent, headed by Caroline Samberana, specializes in empanadas for $2 each. The light pastries are baked and filled with one of three choices: spinach and three Italian cheeses; chicken, red pepper and olives; or beef, olives and spices. The spinach and cheese empanada is especially good, if a little light on filling. On the sugary side, try an alfajor de maizena ($2), sticky dulce de leche sandwiched between two fluffy cookies made from cornstarch and ringed with shredded coconut.

Other Salvadoran standouts can be found at the booths of Rosa Lisana and her neighbor Elba Flores, on the east side of the market (across from the Churreria Madrid Spanish restaurant). Flores and Lisana sell moist tamales ($1.25); yucca rallada ($2.50), a pocket-size street snack similar to hash browns but made with shredded and fried yucca; and plantain chips.

Vegetarian vendor Alfonso Brito cooks with such healthful ingredients as nopales, or cactus paddles; and taro, a tuber that grows in his home state of Tabasco in southern Mexico. His vegetarian mole with mushrooms on a tostada ($2) is rich and satisfying.

One standout beverage is the horchata ($2) made by Maritza Guevara: It's a sweet and creamy rice-based drink made with milk and cinnamon, and nuttier than Mexican versions, thanks to a special ingredient: pulverized pumpkin seed. On Guevara's regular trips to El Salvador, she stops by a market and buys several pounds of seeds, takes them to a mill and has them ground before returning to Washington.

"You can find them here, but they're just not the same," Guevara said. To accompany the horchata, Guevara's ample plates of carne asada, fried plantains, beans and rice are an energy-rich offering for big appetites at $8. Another exotic drink sold by Lisana is made with marañon, or the cashew apple, a fruit popular in El Salvador and Brazil.

Everything at Mi Tierra is available to go, but scarfing it down on a nearby bench, amid the buzz of other market patrons and shouts of "Tamales! Taquitos!" from Lisana and Flores, is more in the spirit of things. Street food, naturally, should be eaten on the street.

Eliza Barclay is a freelance writer who lives in Columbia Heights.