Photograph by Martha Williams
A patio in Sylvan Hills is now home to a colorful market and casual eatery that shines in its simplicity. After years of feeding Georgia State students at their downtown restaurant, Buenos Dias Cafe, Jeannette Flores-Katz and her husband, Ken Katz, opened La Bodega Market & Pupuseria to meet a need they saw for fresh food in the South Atlanta neighborhood.
A native of El Salvador, Flores-Katz wanted to bring her culture to Atlanta, this time through a patio-focused restaurant and market that resembles the communal gardens that dot the neighborhoods of her home country. She designed La Bodega’s outdoor space with flowers, buckets of produce, and picnic benches for seating.
Open from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., the pupuseria serves the same menu for breakfast and lunch. Pupusas are the national dish of El Salvador, and La Bodega makes the griddled corn cakes with a variety of fillings, which you order from a small window for $8 each. You can choose from options such as the traditional black beans and cheese or the Americanized bacon, egg, and cheese. Standouts include the smoky chorizo and cheese as well as the sweet umami of the plantain and beans. Pupusas are an uncomplicated dish but full of flavor. All come topped with salsa roja and curtido, a pickled cabbage slaw.
La Bodega also offers coffee and refrescos, natural fruit juices made in-house, in tropical flavors such as jamaica (hibiscus) and tamarind. Select a flaky guava and cheese pastelito for dessert to give you an excuse to linger on the patio a little longer.
Next to the pickup window is a small market stocked with locally sourced produce and goods, such as coffee beans, hot sauce, and honey. Flores-Katz hopes that this model can address fresh produce needs in Sylvan Hills, one of Atlanta’s largest food deserts. There are also take-home frozen pupusas for sale.
Flores-Katz hosts pop-ups at La Bodega for other chefs (currently, Luz Del Sol Coffee serves drinks there), all carefully vetted by Flores-Katz to ensure they meet the standard she has set, with clean, natural ingredients and community in mind.
This article appears in our January 2026 issue.
