- The easiest way for me to explain it
is exactly like the tortilla to Mexicans, right?
Like, you eat tortilla with everything;
with breakfast, with lunch, snack, dinner, at any time.
So arepas are kind of the same for us.
- I've been eating arepa since I remember.
In Venezuela, arepa is breakfast, snack,
lunch, snack, dinner, snack,
it's the main food for us.
- My name is Maribel Araujo,
and I am the Chief Operator and Owner
for Caracas Arepa Bar.
- My name is German Bracho.
I'm the General Assistant Manager.
- My business partner and I were both born
and raised in Caracas,
and we wanted to pay homage
to our city and our culture and where we come from.
We really didn't know that we wanted to open a restaurant.
It kind of came into a combination of a homesick,
and a need to connect with people in a different way,
and to make a place where
we actually want to be as customers.
- We have like decorations and stuff.
It's like a reminder for them.
They come here, they take pictures.
Oh, look at this.
Oh, look the valley.
Oh, look the beach.
They have a really, really good experience
when they come here,
and that's what matters.
- Hello?
How are you?
- I was pretty confident that New Yorkers
were going to love arepas.
It shows that what we have created,
it's somehow special to people,
not only for customers, but also for employees.
We have people that have been with us
since literally day one.
- My name is Juan Sanchez
and I'm the chef of the restaurant.
When I get to the restaurant,
my first job was a dish washer and I make deliveries.
And then I learned the recipes,
I learned how to cook them,
and arepa is like a bread for Venezuelans.
It's made of corn dough and you grill it
and you put it in the oven.
And you then open it and then you put the fillings inside.
You can see the steam going out,
and that's when you get excited,
and boom, you just feel it, and there we go.
- Here, this is a saying that we have
in our country, in Venezuela, which is
"Camarón que se duerme se lo lleva la corriente."
And the translation exactly will be,
"Shrimps that falls asleep will be taken by the current."
So it's like you keep it tight,
stay on the toes and move forward.
- What we do is actually a type of food
that doesn't necessarily travel really well.
So what we're doing is actually trying
to recreate that experience at home for people.
We're making almost like an arepa at home kit.
The whole idea is that we're gonna teach people
how to open the arepa, how to stuff it and how to eat it.
And we really wanted to pair it with our drink,
and our micheladas are really famous and popular.
So we're gonna be sending people home a little kit
to make their own micheladas,
all what they have to have is a glass, ice and a beer.
-It's an amazing opportunity for us.
We have to take our culture, our roots,
and bring it a little bit higher
to the standards of this city.
- We're actually super excited
to be part of a "Ghost Kitchen" Thrillist pop-up series.
Without restaurants, Thrillist wouldn't exist.
This is actually the city that we're named after.
It's a crazy, as we like to call urban jungle
like a real urban jungle.
I always tell people that go
to actually pay attention
to every single crack on the concrete,
because you're always going to find
a little green growing out of it.
- Even though with this pandemic
we try our best to manage our food
to get the best quality for them.
- Supporting small businesses and restaurants right now
is one of the biggest contributions
that we can do us humans on this planet.
- The community we want,
we want the culture to be together,
to see how we work together.
And I think that through food
that's the best way to start.
- The community and our customers
at our different neighborhoods have been super supportive.
You never know how much of an impact
a restaurant can make on people's lives,
because at the end of the day
we're setting up kind of like a stage
for relationships and for memories and stories to happen.
It's definitely the energy that drives us,
because otherwise I would probably be shut down by now.
- Please come back anytime.
Never stop ordering from us
because we do our best to make sure
that you guys enjoy the Caracas experience.