Rate My Pupusa: Red’s Café

Posted: May 20th, 2011 | Author: Rian ONeill | Filed under: Rate My Pupusa | 7 Comments »

In the Mission, where boys and girls doing their best Mick Jagger wait 70 minutes for poached shrubbery over free-range champagne, Red’s is a haven of breakfast normalcy. Bacon. Eggs. Toast. Hash browns. Bad coffee. When I see a hipster doofus like me at the counter, I get genuinely pissed. “Back off!” I whisper under my breath while starring into my iPhone. “Our kind will be the ruin of this place.”

What most people don’t know is that Red’s moonlights as a damn good pupuseria. This is likely due to the fact that they’re not on the menu. Only a faded whiteboard behind the register lists the pupusa options available after 3:30pm, one of which caught my eye immediately: Crazy–$4.99. No ingredients. No reasoning why it costs more than double the average pupusa. Just Crazy.

Before I get into this pupusa, I should probably do the full disclosure thing and say that I’m a regular at Red’s. For breakfast, I mix it up between bacon and eggs, corned beef hash and pancakes. But at night, I exclusively get Crazy for pick-up. My guy there takes the order, yells “CRAZZZZY” back into the phone and hangs up. Doesn’t tell me how long or ask my name, though I suspect this is because no one else orders it.

Right, back to the pupusa. Last Monday night I was about to watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when a strong hunger struck. I called my guy at Red’s and was greeted at their door 10 minutes later with handshakes and big smiles from the staff. They always make me feel like Gavin Newsom. Pretty rad.

Back home I unloaded the contents of the plastic bag, which weighed the exact amount as a cinder block. Zip locks filled with homemade sauce and fresh cut curtido, plastic cutlery and of course Crazy. (As a public service, I should note that this is not a beginner’s pupusa. It’d be like handing a second grader a recorder and the sheet music to “November Rain”. You’re just not ready.)

I started up 2001, which probably has one of the greatest opening sequences in the history of film. For those unfamiliar, take a minute and watch it. The music will ring a bell instantly, as it has been repurposed countless times when anything great or inspiration is about to happen. Extra points if you recognized it as the theme music for wrestling legend Ric Flair.

Anyways, this epic scene is playing as I open the to-go container and my world turns to slow motion. Crazy is big on an infinite universe scale. Denser and more commanding than a black hole, it would simply absorb any pupusa that dared drift into its gravitational pull. The otherworldly surface is perfectly crisped with bits of cheese oozing from craters in the bulbous center. I suspect they use a welding torch to seal the edges together. It’s disarmingly beautiful.

It was time to stop starring into the void and explore the great unknown. I covered this flying saucer in curtido, dribbled some sauce around and took a bite. In an instant I was blasted into the cosmos, racing at great speeds across vast distances. I zoomed past an asteroid belt of ingredients. There was zucchini and pork and beans and probably some other shit but I’d never know since it’s just called Crazy. It was phenomenal. It was powerful. It was too much.

I tried to slow things down but Crazy had turned into HAL 9000, taking complete command of the ship.

Like Dave, I needed to stop the madness. I floated to the motherboard, grabbed my fork, and, with my last ounce of energy, drove it through Crazy. The lights dimmed. My body was covered in sweat. I closed my eyes and began to weep. It was over. It was over. It was over.

The Dios Mios ranking will match the number of lightyears Crazy takes off your life:

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