Top Salvadoran all dressed up

UNCLE CHITO must have been a chef in a fancy restaurant, or maybe he's just a guy who loves to experiment with gourmet recipes. The salad named for him, Tio Chito's Salvadoran mix, at Jaragua, a 7-month-old Salvadoran restaurant between Hollywood and Koreatown, has many ingredients you won't see in other Salvadoran restaurants around town: Gorgonzola, tropical fruit chunks and raspberry vinaigrette. The dressing lightly coats the salad's baby greens in a style more often found in two- and three-star kitchens.

Just as atypical for its neighborhood is Jaragua's freshly painted building. Someone with a well-honed design sense has done such an "Extreme Makeover" on this corner storefront, you want to enter just to see what's going on. The bold, earthy ocher exterior is impossible to miss among the faded panaderias, pupusarias and the occasional Korean sign along this yet-to-be-gentrified stretch of Beverly Boulevard.

Inside, poster-size original oil paintings dominate the muted adobe-colored walls. Their simple, larger-than-life figures, the work of local artist Rafael Escamilla, inject a folkloric yet style-savvy feel to the large dining room.

But the food is even better than the restaurant's decor. Apart from Uncle Chito's salad and a chicken Caesar with chipotle dressing, the menu is completely traditional and the Salvadoran cooking is perhaps the most beautifully executed in the city right now.

On the list, we spot a few items we've never tried. At dinner one night, we ask our young waitress to explain the "ensalada" drink. She tells us it has fruit chunks, but that doesn't do justice to the thirst-quenching pineapple-based juice filled with a wild assortment of finely chopped apple, mamay (sapote), cashew fruit and brightened with finely minced watercress.

Naturally, we order pupusas. The griddle-baked tortillas arrive fresh and steamy. When we cut them into quarters to share, we find the thin, expertly hand-patted crusts hold in every drop of their melting, juicy fillings.

I liked the delicate rice pupusa with squash and cheese, but the porkaholics at the table swooned over the chicharron (which in many Salvadoran kitchens, including this one, is similar to carnitas) made with a heartier corn crust.

Shrimp cocktail "en salsa rosada" is a massive goblet mounded with pristinely fresh shrimp and avocado chunks that bob in a pink sauce. The light liquid with a trace of cream tastes nothing like the Thousand Island dressing it looks like.