Sometimes the best way to order at a restaurant is to take a wild guess. That’s how I found out about aguïtas de sapo, Venezuela’s bold, spectacular innovation in the realm of fried-cheese technology.
This ain’t no mozzarella stick. The cheese is cut into enormous, inch-thick planks. When it emerges from the fryer, it looks as dark and bubbly-crisp as a piece of hot chicken. It’s placed on top of a bed of pulled pork along with some green cabbage and a gentle sauce, all in a fried arepa that serves as a sandwich bun. Each aguïta is the width of a slider, but the height of a triple cheeseburger. Another way of putting that: it’s shaped like an edible Rubik’s cube.
I stared at mine for a minute at first, trying to figure out how to eat it. I picked it up to take a bite like a burger, but the deep-fried cheese stood so tall I didn’t know if I’d get anything else in the bite. So I grabbed one of the restaurant’s plastic knives and plunged it into the arepa “bun,” straight down. Creamy white cheese spilled forth onto the pulled pork. The aguïta, finally tamed, is delicious. If there’s a friedness scale, the arepa is somewhere around a 6, and the cheese itself is a crunchy, bubbly, caramel-colored 10. There’s just enough of the other ingredients to add balance of flavor, and that’s it.
All of this is on offer at a new Venezuelan restaurant called—get ready for a memorable name—Venezuelan Restaurant. Tucked into a strip mall in northern Richardson, this is a bright all-day café with a breakfast menu and a baked-goods counter, including tres leches cakes in to-go cups. (I brought the D office a bag of guava bread, a soft brown loaf with a swirl of jam through the center. The bag was gone within a few hours, and squirts of guava jam kept leaping out of my slice onto my chin.)
Everything we tried on our first visit to Venezuelan Restaurant was very good. Pabellón criollo is not just a classic dish but a good sample platter: a nourishing cup of black beans, tender pulled pork marinated in spices, a fried egg, a scoop of rice, two plantain strips, and a slice of the same firm white cheese that stars in aguïtas de sapo.
Our server also recommended costilla en coco, pork ribs slow cooked in a coconut milk-based sauce. I frivolously told my friend that it tasted like coconut curry without the curry spice, but it truly is a hearty sauce, and our pork was simmered to pull-apart tenderness. Though the yucca fries on the side were a little anemic in color, the kitchen also provides arepas so you can assemble your own sandwich-like bite.
This was just a first visit. There’s a lot more to come back for at Venezuelan Restaurant: the breakfast menu, including several varieties of empanadas and pasteles; special arepas with picanha steak and pico de gallo; patacones, the sandwiches made with fried plantain taking the place of bread; and mondongo, the Venezuelan rival to menudo, which is served here as a weekend special, just as many Mexican restaurants sell its cousin. Even if you’re visiting for fried cheese, there’s another temptation for you: a burger with both meat and fried cheese as the stars. Come hungry.
Venezuelan Restaurant, 1403 E. Campbell Rd., Ste. 108, Richardson
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