AREPA MIA
307 E. College Ave., Decatur. 404-600-3509, arepamiaatlanta.com. $
An arepa can take many forms, depending on the mood of the person who griddles it. The Venezuelan corn cake might be flat, crisp-edged and drizzled with syrup. It could be a bisected pancake, lined with a few morsels of meat and veggies — a taco that thinks it’s a pita.
And then there’s the happy, hot mess you get at Arepa Mia’s new Decatur location. This arepa is a gaping clamshell so engorged with shredded meats, plantains, guayanés cheese chunks, vegetables and emerald-colored cilantro-parsley sauce that nothing except a large snake could get its mouth around it.
I’m sure chef-owner Lis Hernandez doesn’t mean to overwhelm us with her super-stuffed sandwiches. It’s just that she’s got too much love to give. (The preponderance of heart-shaped signage is a hint. Another is prices that never surpass $10.)
Hernandez’s cultish fans — burger-weary workers who’ve been flocking to her Sweet Auburn Curb Market location since 2012 — love her right back. They forgive the cramped, if cheerily designed, new digs on College Avenue. (An expansion is due to be completed in a few months.)
They also don’t seem to mind the bait-and-switch that I experienced at Arepa Mia — while many of the colorful arepas look like they’re going to be a zingy fiesta in your mouth, unhinge your jaws to take a bite and you’ll find surprisingly monotonous textures and flavors. Sweet and squishy are the dominant notes here.
Of course, there are bright spots. The Sifrina arepa, for instance, has a crisp ruffle of lettuce and a squiggle of Thai chili that breaks through the bland softness of the other innards, among them avocado, crumbly cheese, greasy-sweet fried plantains and shredded chicken.
At least, I think it was chicken. Or maybe that was pork? And what about the filling in my crisp-shelled La Pelua empanada? Was that beef or was I back to chicken?
Mildly seasoned, slow-cooked, shredded and practically identical in texture, the meats begin to blur. I found myself dreaming up a peppery, vinegar-laced slaw to punch up my pork and caramelized onion pernil.
But, here’s the flip side of that yearning — we’re in Decatur, where every other citizen seems to be below age 10. In these parts, culinary sweetness and light isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
My chili-phobic young daughters two-fisted their juicy empanadas and loved the dessert-like Vegetariana cachapa — a corn kernel-studded pancake piled with butter-soft winter squash, black beans, tender spring greens and plantains. They didn’t mind that the plantains were oil-sopped, because they also were fringed with a sugary crust.
Once we’d dressed up those dishes with squirt bottles of Thai chili and habanero sauce, we grown-ups were content with them, too.
Did we leave with mouths tingling, our sinuses satisfyingly excavated? No, but that’s not Hernandez’s promise. Arepa Mia’s motto, after all, is “Happy Stomach, Warm Heart.”
The sweet, cheap plenty at this little joint definitely gave us those.
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