Two decades ago, Maria Del Carmen Flores would push a cart full of yucca and plantain chips through the Mission, serving customers outside restaurants and at bars.
Today, her daughter, Estrella Gonzalez, has a brick-and-mortar location in the center of the Tenderloin at 483 Ellis St., selling pupusas, fried yucca and pan con pollo.
Estrella Gonzalez and her 28-year-old son, Angel, who co-own Estrellita’s Snacks, said they were drawn to the neighborhood because of its lack of Salvadoran food options.
The Mission has at least a dozen places to buy pupusas. But before Estrellita’s Snacks opened last year, the Tenderloin had none. Though their space on Ellis Street is a proper restaurant, Estrella Gonzalez kept “snacks” in the name as a tribute to her mother’s early work, Angel Gonzalez said.
The restaurant also serves as the home base for Estrella Gonzalez’s thriving farmers market business.
In her spacious kitchen, Gonzalez can drop slices of plantain into a fryer, then salt and package them before delivering them to Alemany Farmers Market or Heart of the City Farmers’ Market. She can also prepare the masa dough and hot sauces for her pupusas, which she fries on a griddle at the market, drawing a line of customers as the smell wafts between the stalls.
A good day at the farmers market can bring in five times as much money as the restaurant.
“Those markets, in reality, they’re our biggest supporters when the economy is slow,” Estrella Gonzalez said, her son translating for her between the lunch and dinner rushes. “The customers who can’t get here can always go to the farmer’s markets.”
Estrella Gonzalez, 46, is a graduate of the La Cocina incubator program, which equips women, immigrants and people of color with the resources to start a local business. Earlier, she ran Estrellita’s Snack out of the communal marketplace at La Cocina’s Tenderloin location.
But in 2023, due to a slow recovery from the pandemic, the food hall transitioned to being a shared-use kitchen for those enrolled in La Cocina’s training program, displacing Estrellita’s Snacks, along with a soul food restaurant, a cafe and six other vendors. Nine months later, Gonzalez, with the help of La Cocina, opened the Ellis Street location.
With her own space, Gonzalez said she can set her restaurant’s hours — 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. every weekday — and work through the night if she wants to, packaging chips and going through her books in her upstairs office.
She had to make very few changes to the restaurant space, aside from decorating. Two photos of her mother hang prominently on the walls: One with her cart in the Mission, and one posing outside La Cocina’s flagship location in a long blue dress.
Gonzalez also added six brightly colored paintings on the walls just this month. They were created by a Salvadoran folk artist and depict — in vibrant pinks, purples and blues — life in the countryside.
In one, a woman in a turquoise dress places 14 round pupusas on a hot stone plate, an oven smoking behind her against a background of blue mountains and swaying tropical trees.
“The place without it, it was alive, but it wasn’t as vibrant,” Angel Gonzalez said. The Salvadoran art changed that, he said.
Even with La Cocina’s help, mother and son worry about their next lease, which they are preparing to renegotiate after a disagreement with their landlord. If the rent for their storefront goes up too much, they might close it and look for another kitchen, scaling down to supplying just the farmers market.
The stress of restaurant work can get between them. But wherever they go next, they’ll go together.
“We coordinate with each other well. Once we are calm, we come together and talk about what changes we need to make, and we do it together as a team,” Estrella Gonzalez said.
Daniela X. Sandoval contributed reporting.
I’m glad Estrellita’s is doing well, and good to get the word out about it too! In that spirit it’s worth mentioning Olivo’s at Larkin and Post has been making great papusas for the TL for decades as well.
The customers at the farmers market are normal people ( of course she can make money). In Tenderloin she gets mentally ill drug addicts defecating in front of her business and the City of SF still wants businesses to survive and pay the same amount of taxes! Go SF!