Cachapas On Wheels Rolls In with Venezuelan Sandwiches
The best thing about food blogging is you get to straight-face talk about some really awesome stuff to the normies. It’s awesome to be able to kvell about Serbian kebabs back when Cevap Truck was still around, and even though we’ve reached Peak Korean Fusion, there’s few things better than describing Korilla or Kimchi Taco to non-Manhattanites. Now we get to throw another fun thing in: Venezuelan sandwiches. Cachapas on Wheels premiered in Manhattan earlier this week and they are making their way to Midtown. We’ve got the skinny on these super-dense sandwich bombs – check out below the jump for more.
Bread? Why would you use bread when you can use fried smashed corn or plaintains? The sandwiches are basically variations of fillings from the Venezuelan and Latin-American food pantheon, and cheap, too. Savory and sweet bread equivalents have their representation here. There’s also some interesting looking burrito equivalent and a classic sandwich option.
Helpful visual aids for those of us who aren’t in on the Venezuelan food train just yet. Everything is served up with shredded Romaine lettuce, tomatoes, mayo, and a red semi-tart hot sauce unless you don’t want it. The line was six or seven people deep at 12:05ish here at the busy food truck nexus of Hudson between King and Charlton. Kimchi Taco was parked immediately behind and they had no line whatsoever. That says something.
If you’re super hungry there’s smaller noshes. The tequeños look really awesome – wrap cheese up and fry it until melty, how could it be bad? There was a drink mixer going with something orange, which I assume was the parchita.
Say hello to a yoyo. Because I’m indecisive I went for pernil and chorizo. The guy said it’d be two bucks extra, which was a bit disappointing given that they had two-meat and three-meat options that cost less. Still, the only thing better than chorizo is pernil, so $9 it was. I know what you’re thinking – “MJP, you disappear for something like three years and come back with a sandwich that’s only around 1.75 Metrocards across?” Keep in mind two things – one, that’s not bread, but fried sweet plantain that’s been mashed into semi-bread shape and fried again, and two…
… it’s DENSE. Two of these stacked up could probably be used as armor for tanks. That .75 Metrocard height is stuffed full of meat. They don’t mess around with tomatoes as filler. There wasn’t much tomato to speak of. It’s solid stuff. This is what a $9 sandwich should look like – next time I’m getting a single meat in hopes of evaluating its $7 counterpart.
The chorizo is the non-dried kind, very nice and smoky, with lots of garlic. Sliced on a bias, you get a ton of sausage with this half-and-half beast.
The sandwich bitten through yields perfect, savory pernil that’s just juicy enough to feel good in the mouth (that’s what SHE said) and after a few more bites, you find a piece of fried Venezuelan cheese in the middle. It’s got a nice chewy cut to the sandwich, and you’ve got a great texture interplay going. The plaintain buns are super, SUPER sweet in a good way. It’s nice and mellow sweetness that holds together the tangy pernil and smoky chorizo perfectly. I could have used some onion to cut things and render sharpness, but it’s not a critical omission.
I’m sitting here writing this review with a big, full belly the likes of which a normal sandwich simply couldn’t do. Size matters not, as a great philosopher once said, but oh man, he never said anything about density.
This new truck is an offshoot of Cachapas y Mas, which has two restaurant locations in the far north reaches of Manhattan. They’re aiming to have the truck in Midtown next week. Definitely check these guys out and follow their Twitter/Instagram (@cachapasbk) to stay abreast. Eat a light breakfast, and thank me later.
Posted by MJP at 11:29 am, October 5th, 2015 under Cachapas on Wheels.
20 Comments | RSS comments feed for this post
well done, welcome back and if you keep writing about the big things you put in your mouth we’re going to trade you to ML Philly