San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Chef sees a void, fills it with great tastes
Dishes from Zulia, Venezuela, at home in Texas
When Morelys Diaz talks about the Venezuelan state of Zulia where she’s from, it’s like hearing somebody from Texas talk about Texas.
“Our food is better, our music is better, our place is better,” she said. “That’s what we like to say, but we say it with love.”
Diaz and her husband, Delnys Yaraure, brought their love of Zulia to San Antonio when they opened Zulia’s Kitchen food trailer in 2018, a venture they launched when Diaz looked for Venezuelan restaurants here and came up empty.
Diaz describes Venezuelan food as a mix of European, African and indigenous influences. She handles most of the prep work, braising the brisket, patting out corncakes for arepas, chopping ingredients for pico de gallo, making empanadas and formulating her version of the creamy-sweet Venezuelan drink called chicha.
Yaraure works the flattop grill and fryers at the trailer, putting together more than 20 different dishes for customers who line up for dinner at The Block SA food truck park near the University of Texas at San Antonio.
For Diaz, the trailer marks a transition from her education as an industrial engineer to her passion for cooking, instilled by her father, a chef in Venezuela. Her first job was managing a restaurant, she said, a role that prepared her well for the multitasking food truck life.
“You have to learn to do everything in a restaurant,” she said. “Manage, cook, everything. Because you never know if somebody’s not showing up,
and you have to fill all the vacancies.”
Best dish: For her customers from the state of Zulia, the patacón is their favorite thing to order, Diaz said. They’re on to something. A patacón ($10.99) is a Venezuelan sandwich with fried plantains in place of bread. The starchy fruit is pounded flat and fried crisp, its subtle tropical flavor complementing sweet shredded brisket, ham, coleslaw and cheese.
It’s an argument for adding more plantains to your diet, something Venezuelans understand.
“Just as Mexicans eat tortillas
every day, in Zulia state we eat plantains every day,” Diaz said.
Other dishes: The same everyday observation might be made about arepas, the thick cornmeal cakes split like English muffins and used like sandwich bread for a dish called Arepas Zulia’s Kitchen ($12.99), the most popular order at the trailer, according to Diaz. It’s two arepas with a texture and flavor that’s a cross between cornbread and thick tortillas. They have the infrastructure to hold an overflowing all-star mix of grilled beef, chicken, ham, coleslaw and cheese that’s as messy as an
overstuffed deli sandwich and just as good.
The arepa llanera ($8.99) delivers much of the same satisfying beef-and-chicken experience on a much wider single arepa, trading ham for avocado on a sandwich that needs two hands just to start the negotiation.
The Venezuelan Burger ($9.99) is even more over the top, with a half-pound beef patty adding verticality to a skyscraper burger piled with cheese, bacon, cabbage, tomatoes and crunchy potato sticks.
While Zulia’s offers a solid rendition of the fried cheeseand-pastry sticks called tequeños (three for $4.99) and little pastelitos like Hot Pockets stuffed with ham and cheese or chicken ($2.99 each), they’re not made by hand like Zulia’s empanadas. My empanada ($2.99) was a sturdy pastry shell akin to a Southern fried hand pie stuffed with shredded beef brisket with a sweet barbecue flavor that gave me even more reasons to think Zulia and Texas are spiritual cousins.
The sweetest story at Zulia’s comes from a cold glass of chicha ($3.99). It tastes like thickened horchata with a cinnamon-vanilla glow. It’s usually made with rice, Diaz said, but her version comes from boiling down spaghetti until the gluten breaks down the pasta into a uniform swirl, then adding condensed milk, sugar, cinnamon and vanilla, and icing it down.
Diaz said chicha reminds her of her days as a little girl in Venezuela, when the chicha man, like the ice cream man in the U.S., would come around with his cart, pound his horn and call out, “Chicha! Chicha!” to get the neighborhood kids to come running. Try it, and you’ll understand why they did.