A few years ago, my wife and I befriended a Chinese couple, recent immigrants to this country who had anglicized their names to Winston and Cynthia. They were committed to becoming good Americans, and we were happy to answer their many questions about the mysteries of American culture. In return, they invited us out for what they promised us was an authentic Chinese meal, at Star Kitchen on Federal.
We sat down with them at the table. The waitress handed us English language menus. Winston declined these and told her that we would all be ordering from the Chinese menu. There was a sharp exchange in Cantonese. The waitress looked at us in exasperated disbelief and shook her head as she wrote down the order.
We ate a long succession of completely unfamiliar dishes: a big pile of fried duck jaws glazed with XO sauce; a big pile of tiny whole fried fish bursting with their egg sacks; pork intestines the size and shape of pappardelle swimming in a fermented black bean broth.
Chefs talk a lot about nose-to-tail cooking, about using every part of the animal. This was the real thing. Everything was vigorously seasoned and required some work to eat. You carefully extracted the little bit of meat and crispy skin off the sharp bones of the duck jaws.
And then came the capper: a plate of sea cucumber with baby bok choy. The sea cucumber was a large brown log that was covered with horn-like bumps. My wife and I dug into it with theatrical eagerness.
How would you describe the sea cucumber dish? There is, tellingly, no positive word in English for sliminess, but sliminess is a common and valued feature of many traditional Chinese dishes.
I am glad that I experienced what was an expertly prepared and authentic Chinese meal. But I have say that I went back to eating General Tso’s Chicken and Beef with Broccoli and the occasional soup dumpling.
In 2025, the authentic is an unabashedly positive marker. For cross-cultural respect, down-to earthiness, even a certain kind of political engagement. The authentic has an offshoot in culinary adventure tourism, as practiced by Andrew Zimmern or Anthony Bourdain.
Zimmern’s Travel Channel show reminded us that the world is more bizarre than we think it is and that the goal of travel should be not to find a Nike outlet on a remote Caribbean island, but to silence the familiar and welcome the strange.
And Bourdain would eat the most unappealing-sounding dishes (warthog offal in Namibia; fermented shark fin in Iceland) out of a spirit of openness and civility, even as he suffered the consequences that his colleague suffered (“the inside of my head feels like Andrew Zimmern’s toilet”).
Edwin Sandoval, who owns Xatrucho Concepts, is trying to bring authentic Honduran food to Denver. But he also acknowledges, “If it’s too classic, people won’t understand it; if it’s too traditional, you won’t make a connection.”
Edwin represents a new kind of culinary chef/entrepreneur, one who makes his living and his name away from the traditional restaurant space. Edwin has worked in food halls, in pop-ups and event spaces( he tells a vivid anecdote about doing a dinner in a warehouse where the power went out and he cooked by the light of a dozen servers’ iPhones). During the pandemic, he ran a huge online cooking class (“’Now take the chicken out of the bag’ and then there was the sound of 80 people opening 80 Styrofoam containers at once”). He is able to make a living, turn a profit, and take extended, culinary -themed vacations.
Edwin, whom I’ve known for years, is a born entrepreneur. He is smarter, harder-working, and more self-controlled than most people he works with, or for. He is handsome-and-knows-it, and like most short, self-possessed men, stands ramrod straight, moves more slowly than he has to, and meets your eyes with a calm, level gaze.
Edwin, unlike most chefs, thinks a lot about design and marketing. Before launching his business, he would spend a lot of time in cafes with a notebook and a pen. “Xatrucho” comes from the Honduran epithet “Catrucho,” as universal there as “Hey, bro” is here. Edwin thought the logo would look better if he substituted the C with a bolder X.
Food, like design, demands a little finessing for the dining public.
Take Edwin’s signature dish, his version of the Honduran lunch staple espagueti. As with most poor countries, Honduras’ food is characterized by inexpensive, filling, starch-heavy dishes. Meat is an accent rather than a feature and is used in the form of highly seasoned cured meats or cheaper cuts like head, spleen, or feet.
Espagueti is traditionally made with dried pasta, a soffritto of garlic, tomato, culantro (a wild cilantro with a floral taste similar to epazote), lots of cumin and coriander, and a stock cube; it is usually finished with margarine rather than butter. Many Honduran home cooks use a canned soffritto rather than make their own.
But here is where the dish gets weird, or authentic. Espagueti is served on a bed of rice. With a side of poached green banana. Additionally, the pasta is served without cheese, and, like almost all Honduran food, it isn’t spicy.
And here you can see the problem with presenting an authentic dish to the American dining public. First of all, there is problem with the starch-on-starch-on-starch character of the dish. Americans, at least the segment of the population that will pay for exotic and refined foods, tend to be carb-phobic. Another segment of the dining population will only go out for premium proteins like ribeyes or sushi.
For most of us, Latin American food is understood through the fiery portal of Mexican cuisine. But in many Latin American countries, in Venezuela, Argentina, Chile and Honduras, the food is quite mild. My wife is Venezuelan, and most of her family has a low tolerance for spicy food.
Edwin’s American guests were initially puzzled and disappointed by the lack of chiles in the dish, so Edwin made the Espagueti just spicy enough to please them. He also made a delicate pasta by hand rather than using dry noodles. He replaced the margarine (a wartime staple invented by one of Napoleon’s chefs to supplant more expensive and perishable dairy butter) with butter. And he got rid of the rice and the plantains.
I asked Manny Barella, a James Beard nominee, Top Chef contestant, and former chef of Bellota, about the importance of authenticity in what chefs do. He acknowledged that Honduran food is a little-known quantity in this city and faces challenges that Mexican food has been more successful in surmounting.
“There is very bright light shining on Mexican food right now,” Manny says. “And I am unapologetically Mexican!” he adds with the big, welcoming laugh that amplifies most of his conversation.
“I want the customer to drive past three Mexican restaurants serving crispy tacos with lettuce on their way to my place,” he says.
Steve Ells of Chipotle removed Manteca from his version of Mexican food. Manny puts it back in. When Manny did one his many popups, he opened the meal with a plate of Chapulines, the traditional dish made with crickets that he had airfreighted from Oaxaca.
“One of the things that I have noticed from Hispanic chefs is the ones that stick to their guns and say, ‘This is what I do. This is the flavors that I bring’ are doing the best,” he concludes.
Edwin admits he gets frustrated sometimes by the monotonous quality of Honduran food in this country. Everywhere he travels in America, he goes to the highest rated Honduran restaurant in that city. “It’s huge portions of the same couple of dishes. Exactly the same approach. I still think you can represent yourself culturally and make a bit of money,” he says.
One of the last things Edwin shows me is a remarkable photograph of an artifact from his grandmother’s village in Honduras. It is a smooth, tan piece of river rock. It sits near an annatto tree, which yields the pods that provide the earthy reddish paste used to spice meats. The kids would open the pods, and his grandmother would soak them in water and then grind them on the rock. The rock has been used so extensively that there is a deep groove going down the middle of it.
“That,” Edwin says, “is what I’m trying to bring.”
