I like when things like this happen.
I was eating at El Sabor Latino for a story I was doing on the Colombian restaurant. I began talking to some fellow diners when one of them offered me some of the pancake-looking item he was eating. He wanted me to try it.
I did. And now I’m hooked.
It’s an “arepa de choclo.” It’s sort of a pancake and sort of Southern cornbread. It’s sweet, but not very sweet. It has a great corn taste to it. It’s topped with a flat piece of cheese. And it comes with two pats of butter.
I love sweet and savory, so this fit the bill perfectly for me.
I asked El Sabor Latino owner Samir Restrepo to fill me in on this tasty whatever-you-call-it.
“Arepa is a cornbread,” Restrepo says. “It’s made with sweet corn flour.”
The cheese, he says, is “queso fresco,” he says. “It’s a white cheese.”
They serve arepas de choclo as an appetizer at El Sabor Latino. In Colombia, he says, they eat them in the morning as a breakfast item or at night as a dessert “with chocolate or coffee.”
The Colombian platter, which comes with a variety of Colombian items, includes the regular arepa, which is made with whole corn instead of the sweet corn flour.
In case you think you’re getting something even sweeter, “choclo” doesn’t mean “chocolate.” “‘Choclo’ is the sweet corn. In Colombia we call it ‘sweet corn.’”
A little background on Restrepo. He’s from Cali, Colombia. In 2003, he moved to Memphis, where he and his wife, Yuri Guzman, and her parents Carlos Ruiz and Esneth Azevedo decided to open a Colombian restaurant in Memphis, with Guzman and Azevedo, who owned El Punto del Sabor restaurant in Colombia, as chefs.
Restrepo plans to open his second restaurant, El Pollo Latino, in late September or early October. The restaurant will feature oven-roasted chicken cooked on a rotisserie. I can’t wait for that.
After I finished my arepa de choclo, I had to go next door to Kay Bakery for a gingerbread man, one of my favorite cookies. They use the bakery’s original cookie cutter and the original recipe for the gingerbread men, says Queo Bautista, who, along with his brother, Misael Bautista, bought the bakery in 2007.
El Sabor Latino is at 665 Avon Road; (901) 207-1818.
Kay Bakery is at 667 Avon Road; (901) 767-0780.
