Owner Maria Barreda (seated) and her staff (including manager Sandra Barreda, left) are in constant motion inside BARREDA’s open kitchen.

With all the food options in our city of unabashed excess, you’d be hard-pressed to turn up a Honduran tamale if it meant your life. The West Bank is known by ethnically curious foodies to be pocked with little houses that serve things like bubble tea, curried goat and rehydrated jellyfish. Let’s add the Honduran tamales at Barreda’s Supermarket and Restaurant to that list, although I wouldn’t bet my life on finding one there in my final moments.

  West Bankers should be familiar enough with the intersection of Terry Parkway and Stumpf Boulevard to spy Barreda’s faded sign between Popeye’s Chicken and Hi-Do Bakery in the half-empty strip mall. The rest of us might have to stop off at Terrytown’s Farmers Market for reassurance shortly after exiting the expressway. When the guy at the counter tries to bargain down his peculiarly soft melons in exchange for directions, go for an avocado instead.

  The pay phone outside the Central American convenience store rarely gets a break. Customers from the Colombian restaurant two spaces down mingle with Barreda’s employees as they leave for home. There are more exotic fruit juice cans than plastic soda bottles in the trash barrel.

  Inside, re-runs play quietly on a TV near the front register. The narrow aisle specializing in Latin American magazines is by far the most popular, although the shallow store is stocked with grocery items not readily available at most West Bank supermarkets: plastic tortilla warmers, sugared bread (pan dulce), cans of guava paste, yuca, breadfruit, finger bananas and bags of saffron flowers for 99 cents.

  Most of the action, however, occurs in the restaurant on the other side of the store. I haven’t actually seen it bustle, but there is constant motion in the open kitchen of women (only women) patting together pupusas filled with salty white cheese and a strong paste of chicharron, pounding on beef for bistek encebollado and wrapping pairs of corn tortillas in aluminum foil.

  There’s one menu, married to the counter beneath wrinkled plastic. If you’ve never lamented the lack of tongue tacos (taco lengua), beef tripe soup (sopa de menudo) or pinto beans with rice on other menus around town, you might not be impressed with your choices. But friends who have traveled extensively in Central America reacted to Barreda’s menu like expatriates spotting their first cup of movie popcorn in a decade. And despite the surface monotony of the selection (protein, beans, rice and tortillas for $6.50), there are a couple striking discoveries.

  Here’s the hint: soup. It was a Saturday, and the room was cluttered with deep, empty bowls and vacant crab exoskeletons. Following the kind demands of a woman at a nearby table who jabbed furiously at her bowl with both index fingers, I too ordered the seafood soup (sopa marisco). The brown broth was rich with the flavor of crab shells, and spicy crabmeat pulled from the knobby halves after some innovative cracking techniques. A mighty fillet of sturdy white fish lidded the bowl. The soup suffered from cooked-to-mush shrimp and mussels, but a few squirts of fresh lime coaxed it all down.

  It was another scheduled Saturday guest that really rocked our table, though. Chewy but tender conch (caracol) rippled and humped out of the second soup like it was the Loch Ness, fighting yuca for space in the leagues of cilantro-specked coconut broth. All told, I liked Barreda. I liked the rotation of friendly women who humored my English while they recorded my orders in Spanish; I liked the $2.50 vat of milky horchata despite its cloying sweetness because it’s so difficult to find elsewhere, and I found the salty, well-done beef smothered in onions utterly satisfying wrapped up with beans in corn tortillas. But I would send my friends across the Mississippi during rush hour for this conch soup.

  I might not go back during peak traffic hours for Barreda’s selection of authentic tamales, but that’s mostly because the availability is so sporadic. On two visits there were none at all; on my third trek, a Guatemalan version for $2.50 was the size of my shoe. Damp banana leaf gave way to wet masa, green olives, capers and hunks of long-cooked pork. A similarly prepared Honduran tamale was stuffed instead with stew-like beef, potatoes and green peas.

  Although owner Maria Barreda hails originally from Cuba, the women of the kitchen and Barreda’s primary clientele come from points all over Central America. Which explains the international tamale selection (the menu also lists Cuban, Nicaraguan and Mexican tamales), as well as the beverage case on the supermarket side. Clutter your table with guarana soda (a "natural" stimulant), tangy Honduran beer, mango juice from Thailand, and molasses-rich non-alcoholic malt beverage, which was particularly popular one afternoon with a customer buying Barreda’s entire stock of plantains.

  But don’t even look at the flautas sagging under the heat lamp, and save the restroom until after you eat. Although that could change when Barreda’s moves to a larger location just across Stumpf Boulevard next month, they wouldn’t dare touch that conch soup.