The pupusa allures, among the few street food standbys that remain remarkably ungentrified, a culinary property from the streets of San Salvador that’s shared by the hundreds of Latin American restaurants that lay scattered in the boroughs. In fact, Guillermina Ramirez began making them while working at a Mexican restaurant over a decade before she decided to get into the restaurant business herself.

But pupusas weren’t on her mind when she had opened a humble cafe in Ridgewood called Bud & Bean in late 2019, a culinary alternative to the two taco shops next door. When sales started to lag after the pandemic hit, Ramirez decided to risk the budding eatery’s fate on something that could be picked up easily and consumed at home. She nixed the room full of tables lit by the restaurant’s large glass window and enlarged the kitchen with a large, flat stove. A rebrand was in order and Pupusas Ridgewood was born.

“The idea of just having only pupusas on the menu was kind of strange, because for a lot of Mexican restaurants, the menus can be so varied and large,” Itanriquri Flores told Bushwick Daily. A bright, young graphic designer, she’s Ramirez’s daughter and had already sketched a vivid new advertisement for the pupuseria, comprising of a single floating pupusa, positioned like a singularly cheesy cloud in the sky. Working at her mother’s side, she’s regularly joined by Armando Santos, a charismatic family friend who describes Ramirez’s decision to open in the midst of the pandemic “courageous.”