Best Place to Eat at a Counter
Café Venezuela
The chatter may be more lively (and en inglés) at a more traditional diner counter, but the thirteen-stool counter at Café Venezuela becomes a veritable United Nations during the lunch hour. That's when gregarious owner Jose Garcia starts serving thick sandwiches, fried empanadas and sopa de mondodango to blue-collar workers, Latin American immigrants, hungry college students and neighborhood regulars. It's all about the counter action here, since there's only one table in the place (and so awkwardly conspicuous that few customers want to sit there). The heavy fare is especially good cold-weather cuisine; one hearty meal can satisfy for the rest of the day. Start with a Chilean empanada, baked in a doughy flour crust and stuffed with beef, raisins and hard-boiled eggs, or the lighter Venezuelan version, a crispy half-moon of fried cornmeal wrapped around more intensely spiced beef or pork. There's also a roasted pork sandwich, layered with lettuce, tomato and crumbled potato chips on a crusty baguette-style roll. Garcia imports bubbly sweet soda pop from Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Peru (Inca Kola tastes like ginger ale) and pours coffee that's so strong, you'll stay awake for the next three days. Café Venezuela's newest dessert offering is an oblea de cajeta: caramel and coconut melted between two wafer cookies that look like oversized communion wafers. Perfect for communing.
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