Mis Raices Salvadorean Restaurant is a family owned restaurant. Sticking to our natural roots, Since we opened in 2009 we have served authentic food from our country. “There is nothing better that the flavor of our land”.

We like preserving our customs for our children to see and also to invite people of other countries to experience our culture.

We happy to have been featured in the LA Times in 2011.

Please see article below and our tv commercial!

 

A Fuller Flowering of

Salvadorean Flavors

By Bill Esparza, Special to the Los Angeles Times

In Lake Balboa, another local Salvadorean enclave, Mercedes Rodriguez’s Mis Raices, serves pitos con huevo (a dish that might make a Mexican teenager snicker), the red pito flower cooked with eggs. Amazingly, the pito tastes like a pungent sausage. Pito also comes in alguaishte, a traditional Salvadoran sauce made from ground squash seeds, similar to a home-style Mexican mole.

Rellenos are here too, such as the güisquil, what Salvadoreans call the chayote: mixed with cheese, fried in an egg batter, topped with a tomato sauce and served alongside well-seasoned re-fried red beans and rice. Rodriguez isn’t afraid of big flavors.

At $5.99, the fritada is a steal: pig heart, ears, cheeks, tongue and liver are blanched then sautéed in tomato and yerba buena (mint) and bell pepper, giving it a sweet herbal kiss.

And the flor de izote? “Friends always bring it to me from my hometown, Quezaltepeque, La Libertad,” says Rodriguez.

It also grows wild in Pasadena and is a common garden plant there. In the summer, when an illicit trade in spineless yucca booms in the Salvadoran community around MacArthur Park, the white national flower of El Salvador will show up on the tables of home kitchens and in some tamales on the streets of Westlake. If you can’t cop them in MacArthur Park, you could always try to grow your own — we hear the plants are available at IKEA.

Featured in the LA Times March 24, 2026