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Food guide

How to find good arepas near you, Venezuelan or Colombian

The first thing to establish is which country's arepa you are getting. Venezuelan arepas are thick, split open and stuffed like a pocket; Colombian arepas are thinner, often griddled with cheese and eaten flat. Both are corn cakes and that is roughly where the similarity ends.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Made to order, not held — Arepas go leathery within twenty minutes. A griddle running constantly is the signal.
  • A crisp shell and a soft interior — Griddled then sometimes finished in the oven. Uniformly soft means undercooked; uniformly hard means held.
  • Fillings made in house — Reina pepiada — chicken and avocado — should taste of both. Carne mechada should be long-braised.
  • Real queso de mano or costeño — Fresh mild cheese, not shredded mozzarella.
  • Nata or garlic sauce on the side — Venezuelan places put out a thin garlic sauce; Colombian ones offer nata, a cultured cream. Their presence signals a kitchen cooking for its own community.

What to order

  • Reina pepiada — Venezuelan, chicken and avocado. The best-known and a good benchmark.
  • Pabellón — Shredded beef, black beans, plantain and cheese. The Venezuelan national plate in an arepa.
  • Arepa de choclo — Colombian sweet corn arepa with cheese. Almost a dessert.
  • Arepa de huevo — Colombian coastal — a whole egg fried inside. Order it hot.
  • Cachapa, if offered — A sweet fresh-corn pancake folded around cheese. Not an arepa but usually on the same menu and often the best thing there.

Where to find arepas

Arepas is mostly found at Colombian restaurants and Venezuelan restaurants, so that is where to look. Open listings put 1,605 of them across the US, and these are the cities and campuses with the most.

Cities with the most

Miami, FL 83 New York, NY 66 Orlando, FL 50 Tampa, FL 35 Elizabeth, NJ 35 Doral, FL 35 Chicago, IL 27 Kissimmee, FL 24 Houston, TX 19 Hialeah, FL 19 Hollywood, FL 17 West New York, NJ 13

Campuses with the most within a mile

MDC 8 LaGuardia 7 FIT 6 Yeshiva University 5 NYU 5 Kean 5 FIU 5 The New School 4 RACC 4 CUNY Graduate Center 4

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Arepa searches resolve to Venezuelan or Colombian where the search implies one, since the two are different dishes with the same name. The matcher reads for named fillings — reina pepiada, pabellón, de choclo — which are unambiguous about which tradition a kitchen is cooking.

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Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

When you might want this

Where to eat when you're broke Where to take the team for lunch What to eat when nothing sounds good