You searched for:

Start over

Narrow Search

  • Year

  • Section

  • Category

Best of Kansas City

  |  

Food & Drink

Best Place to Eat at a Counter 

Café Venezuela

Café Venezuela
719 Central Avenue, Kansas City, Kansas, 913-233-2660
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.

Previously in Best of Kansas City

Comments (2)

Showing 1-2 of 2

Add a comment

Cafe Venezuela has great food. Jose Garcia is the nicest guy. He makes this awesome secret hot sauce. I had a craving for their empanadas and pabellon a couple of months ago and found out they have closed there doors. A very sad day!!!! I will miss Jose's kindness and the great food he makes. Jose.....if you out there and you read this, please open a restaurant or invite me over for dinner. :)

report   
Posted by Anne on 02/25/2010 at 6:24 PM

Cafe Venezuela has great food. Jose Garcia is the nicest guy. He makes this awesome secret hot sauce. I had a craving for their empanadas and pabellon a couple of months ago and found out they have closed there doors. A very sad day!!!! I will miss Jose's kindness and the great food he makes. Jose.....if you out there and you read this, please open a restaurant or invite me over for dinner. :)

report   
Posted by Anne on 02/25/2010 at 3:24 PM
Subscribe to this thread:
By Email
With RSS
Showing 1-2 of 2

Add a comment


All contents ©2012 Kansas City Pitch LLC
All rights reserved. No part of this service may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Kansas City Pitch LLC,
except that an individual may download and/or forward articles via email to a reasonable number of recipients for personal, non-commercial purposes.

All contents © 2012 SouthComm, Inc. 210 12th Ave S. Ste. 100, Nashville, TN 37203. (615) 244-7989.
All rights reserved. No part of this service may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of SouthComm, Inc.
except that an individual may download and/or forward articles via email to a reasonable number of recipients for personal, non-commercial purposes.
Website powered by Foundation