Forty years ago, a Salvadoran family opened a small restaurant at 6 Glen St. in downtown Glen Cove and started griddling pupusas. The city looked different. The block looked different. El Tazumal is still there, still run by the Villatoro family, and this month the restaurant celebrated four decades of feeding the city, with an album of photos on its own page announcing the milestone and neighbors filling the dining room to mark it.

Forty years on one block

El Tazumal opened in 1986, years before Salvadoran food was easy to find on Long Island. The Island's Salvadoran community was still young then, growing as families arrived through the 1980s, and a restaurant serving the food of home was as much a gathering place as a business. Founder Felipe Villatoro still belongs to the place, and the family's second generation helps run it today.

The name is a landmark in itself. Tazumal is the great Maya ruin in western El Salvador, one of the country's most recognizable sites, and putting that name on a storefront in Nassau County in 1986 was a statement about exactly what would be coming off the griddle.

This month the city noticed the anniversary the way small cities do. Downtown business groups and local officials turned out for a ribbon cutting at the restaurant, and the celebration photos show the dining room shoulder to shoulder. Forty years puts El Tazumal among the longest-running restaurants of any kind in downtown Glen Cove, through recessions, a pandemic and every reinvention Glen Street has been through around it.

The pupusa math

The menu is the argument for going. A pupusa filled with cheese runs $2.25, and the loroco, bean and chicharrón versions are $3, each one a griddled corn pocket that comes with curtido, the lightly pickled cabbage slaw, and a thin red salsa for spooning over the top. Three of them make a meal that costs less than a sandwich almost anywhere else in Nassau County.

The rest of the menu goes deeper than most Long Islanders have explored. Yuca con chicharrón pairs fried cassava with crisp pork and curtido for $11. Pan con gallina, the Salvadoran hen sandwich soaked in its own gravy, is $13. There are tamales de elote, sweet corn tamales served with cream and cheese, whole fried porgy with rice and salad for $14, and breakfasts of eggs with chorizo. Delivery in the area is free, and the restaurant is open seven days a week.

Why places like this last

Restaurants fail young. The ones that reach 40 tend to share a shape: a family that owns the work, a menu that does not chase trends, and a community that treats the dining room as its own. El Tazumal has all three. Its customer base spans generations now, families who came for a taste of El Salvador in the 1980s and their kids and grandkids who grew up on pupusas the way other Long Island kids grew up on bagels.

Glen Cove's downtown has spent the last decade adding apartments, arts programming and new storefronts, and the city's restaurant row keeps turning over around the survivors. A 40th anniversary on Glen Street is rarer than a grand opening, and it is worth more.

If you go

El Tazumal is at 6 Glen St. in downtown Glen Cove, a short walk from the city's municipal lots. Go hungry, order more pupusas than you think you want, and ask for extra curtido. Forty years of practice is not something you can taste everywhere on Long Island, and here it costs $3 a pupusa.