It’s a scorching hot Tuesday afternoon in Huntington Park, and a stalled-out Toyota Prius is blocking the middle of a strip mall parking lot that may be home to one of the best fried chicken dishes in California.
“I’ll help you,” a Honduras Kitchen manager yells in Spanish to the obviously embarrassed driver of the Prius.
Me and my nephew quickly join, only to discover you can’t really push a dead 2007 Prius no matter how many leg days you’ve banked—because there is no easy way to put it in neutral.
No matter. It’s the kind of moment—a restaurateur dropping everything to help a member of the community—that Honduras’ Kitchen has become known for these days.
Back when it first opened in the early 90s, it was known for its sopa de caracol, which the late great Jonathan Gold described as “a shrine to the mighty Caribbean mollusk caracol, a Caribbean mollusk that is culinarily, if not biologically, identical to the Italian scungilli and the Florida conch . . . though the word caracol translates literally as ‘snail.’”