
Photos courtesy of Alma Café
Honduran dishes served at Alma Café in New Orleans
To me, strip malls have always felt like portals, concrete cacophonies of businesses cozied up together in jarring harmony. In New Orleans, Metairie, and Kenner, it’s often the strip malls where you’ll find some of the region’s best secrets: authentic Honduran cuisine. In these restaurants, platters are piled high with chicken and plantains; breakfast plates with blocks of salty cheese, refried beans, eggs, and sliced avocado; and one of the Central American country’s most famous dishes, baleadas.
If you order a baleada at Norma’s Sweets Bakery in Mid-City, the woman behind the counter will smack dough between her hands, flatten it into a patty, and roll it into a full moon before throwing it on the stovetop. The resulting tortilla is pillowy and chewy and between its folds is a spread of refried beans, zig zags of crema, scrambled eggs, and slices of ripe avocado. Go to Norma’s any week day at lunch time, and the line will be long, a few construction crews deep.
Back in the day, if you stopped by the hot food bar of Big Easy Fresh Market on Broad, you’d find it contained more than moderate Honduran selections: baleadas that sold out in the morning, and on Saturdays, the Honduran specialty sopa de caracol con coco, a curry-like conch soup with coconut milk, chunks of seafood, and potato. You can find the same soup at Pollitos Azucar, where a party extends into the sidewalk on Fridays and Saturdays—not to mention the dozens of other specialties at the restaurants that dot Williams Boulevard in Kenner.
It’s a little-known fact that New Orleans houses the largest Honduran American community in the United States. And how it got that way has a lot to do with one now-quotidian fruit: the banana.

Courtesy of Alma Café
A traditional Honduran breakfast, Alma Café
Samuel Zemurray arrived in the U.S. from Eastern Europe in 1891 at the age of fourteen. He started his business in Mobile as a fruit peddler reselling the United Fruit Company’s discarded bananas (the “ripes”) to grocers across the South. After almost a decade in the business, he partnered with fruit merchant Ashbel Hubbard to form the Hubbard-Zemurray Steamship Company, soon after acquiring the Cuyamel Fruit Company and purchasing property in Honduras to establish his own plantations. By this point, he was settled in New Orleans, which had a larger port.
The American author O. Henry coined the term “banana republic” in his 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings in reference to Honduras, to which the author fled (after a stint in New Orleans) to escape embezzlement charges. The term refers to a small country whose instability stems from the reliance on a single commodity—or rather, a larger country’s exploitation of said commodity.
Zemurray had an enormous hand in controlling the sways of the banana republic of Honduras, supporting a failed coup against President Miguel Dávila in 1908 and a successful one a few years later. His competitor, United Fruit Company, owned vast swathes of land in Central America to harvest the crop, which gave it overwhelming power in governmental politics. It wasn’t long before “Sam the Banana Man” took over the United Fruit Company, acquiring all that land, and power, for himself. As president, Zemurray continued to politically wrangle things in his favor in Central America. The United Fruit Company lobbied for the U.S.-backed coup of Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz after his reform laws were set to undermine their land dominance and labor abuse (Notably, the company’s revenue was twice that of the Guatemalan government).
At the center of it all were the boats that transported the bananas from Honduras to the United States. This is how the family of Chef Melissa Araujo, of the modern Honduran restaurant Alma Café, ended up in New Orleans.

Photos courtesy of Alma Café
Pollo en Crema at Alma Café
Araujo has citizenship in three countries (Italy, Honduras, and the United States) and a family history of immigration and industry tied closely with the banana trade. Her maternal grandfather, originally from Sicily, came to New Orleans and then to Honduras to work for the United Fruit Company. Her father, a Honduran with Mayan and European lineage, initially came over to New Orleans on the banana cargo boats the company operated. Araujo herself was born in La Ceiba, a city on the northern coast of Honduras, and she grew up in the States with summers spent between Honduras and Italy.
After years running a catering company in New Orleans, Araujo opened Alma Café in 2020. Operating out of the Bywater, the restaurant is perhaps the most visible of the city’s Honduran offerings. Alma is geared towards the roving dining class, with a decked-out space, a bar program, a prime location, and a contemporary take on tradition. Here, Araujo invites the uninitiated to the Central American table.
She anticipated criticism. “The traditional food stays in the house,” she said. “In Alma, I take what is modern, and I interpret it to what I want the Honduran cuisine to be pushing toward.”
[Read this story about Afro-Honduran American baker Bryan Ford, from our December 2021 issue.]
Araujo’s hope is to put Honduran food on the map as a cuisine worthy of dining out. She also hopes to push it out from under the shadow of the Mexican food umbrella, where too many diners tend to place Central American cuisine.
“In the beginning, when we opened in 2020, a lot of people [would ask], ‘Oh, can we have chips and salsa?’ And my waiters would make sure that I was not around because my answer was, ‘I'm not Mexican!’” Araujo said, laughing.

Courtesy of Alma Café
A baleada from Alma Café
One only needs to consider the geography of Central America to recognize the myriad influences underscoring the Honduran table. With its Caribbean coastline, Honduras possesses the African influence of all countries touched by the slave trade. The cuisine takes cues from the Garifuna in the north, who are descendants of Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean peoples. Their use of coconut milk inflects the national cuisine, and can be found in rice and beans, soup, and even the tortillas.
As Alma expands into dinner service, Araujo is intent on incorporating more Mayan techniques into her cooking. The Huevos Creillos references the Indigenous Lenca, the Mediterranean, and the African influence in Honduras. The Pollo en Crema y Loroco has layers of crema and caramelized leeks to cut the bitterness of the loroco (you’ll often see it in Salvadorian pupusas), as well as sofrito, infused olive oil, and herbs.
“You have layer against layer against layer,” Araujo said, referencing traditional tajadas of fried meat and plantains with chismol (similar to, though distinct from, pico de gallo), piled on like eras of history pushed up against each other.

Photo courtesy of Alma Café.
Melissa Araujo, Executive Chef at Alma Café.
Then there’s the baleada. Araujo has faced criticism over the double-digit price of her baleada, where elsewhere they can be found for under ten, sometimes five dollars. But she’s filling hers to the brim with well-seasoned beans, crema, egg, avocado, and meat. She aims to make the handheld delicacy abundant and heavy, like she remembers them growing up.
Thus, the effects of the industry that created the channel between Honduras and the United States still lingers around the table. The hefty chorizo platters of La Hacienda 504 or the pollo chucho of Sabores de Mi H, where the fatty meat is cut with slaw and sweet plantain, is food meant to nourish after hours of labor. Araujo calls it a “raw cuisine,” though that doesn’t mean unrefined.
“You know Honduras, our food is very heavy because we work the fields. If it's not the mountains, it's working the ocean, especially where I'm from. The fishery is huge … But everywhere you go, you're always going to see a lady in the corner selling baleadas.”

Photo courtesy of Alma Café
Pescado Ceibeno
Last year, Araujo visited her home country for a month, teaching in culinary schools for the United States government. She lamented how much she observed the “colorful culture” of Honduras becoming increasingly subsumed by the shadow of its upstairs neighbor. “I found out that there is a lot of talent, but they're using that talent to get out of the country. And Honduras is becoming every year more and more Americanized, and we're losing our traditions of cooking…I always tell people, I am not the best chef, but I’ll be the one to open that door that will bring those chefs more opportunity.”
[Try out Chef Melissa Araujo's recipe for Aquachile Negro, here.]
In New Orleans, the history is encoded in the streets, the names, the flora. Honduras is tucked in there, too. The name and image of Francisco Morazán, who attempted to unite the Central American countries into one powerful nation, is dotted all over Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and can be found in statue form on Basin Street. The 504 country code for Honduras might sound familiar to New Orleanians. The banana tree in my New Orleans backyard is often overgrown, seasonally lush with tiny buds and then droopy with fruit. It grows relentlessly, slowly trekking upward and into the roof and windows, a subtle forcefulness that echos Zemurray’s capital dedication to commodify its fruits. And of course, the history is in the dishes, hearty and delicious. Whether you visit Alma or Tia Maria’s, order the conch soup or Honduran tacos, you’ll be sure to get a taste of banana.