Samir Restrepo – Memphis Flyer

Best Bets: Arepa de Choclo at El Sabor Latino

I like when things like this happen.

I was eating at El Sabor Latino for a story I was doing on the Colombian restaurant. I began talking to some fellow diners when one of them offered me some of the pancake-looking item he was eating. He wanted me to try it.

I did. And now I’m hooked.

It’s an “arepa de choclo.” It’s sort of a pancake and sort of Southern cornbread. It’s sweet, but not very sweet. It has a great corn taste to it. It’s topped with a flat piece of cheese. And it comes with two pats of butter.

I love sweet and savory, so this fit the bill perfectly for me.

I asked El Sabor Latino owner Samir Restrepo to fill me in on this tasty whatever-you-call-it.

“Arepa is a cornbread,” Restrepo says. “It’s made with sweet corn flour.”

The cheese, he says, is “queso fresco,” he says. “It’s a white cheese.”

They serve arepas de choclo as an appetizer at El Sabor Latino. In Colombia, he says, they eat them in the morning as a breakfast item or at night as a dessert “with chocolate or coffee.”

The Colombian platter, which comes with a variety of Colombian items, includes the regular arepa, which is made with whole corn instead of the sweet corn flour.

In case you think you’re getting something even sweeter, “choclo” doesn’t mean “chocolate.” “‘Choclo’ is the sweet corn. In Colombia we call it ‘sweet corn.’”

A little background on Restrepo. He’s from Cali, Colombia. In 2003, he moved to Memphis, where he and his wife, Yuri Guzman, and her parents Carlos Ruiz and Esneth Azevedo decided to open a Colombian restaurant in Memphis, with Guzman and Azevedo, who owned El Punto del Sabor restaurant in Colombia, as chefs.

Restrepo plans to open his second restaurant, El Pollo Latino, in late September or early October. The restaurant will feature oven-roasted chicken cooked on a rotisserie. I can’t wait for that.

After I finished my arepa de choclo, I had to go next door to Kay Bakery for a gingerbread man, one of my favorite cookies. They use the bakery’s original cookie cutter and the original recipe for the gingerbread men, says Queo Bautista, who, along with his brother, Misael Bautista, bought the bakery in 2007.

El Sabor Latino is at 665 Avon Road; (901) 207-1818.

Kay Bakery is at 667 Avon Road; (901) 767-0780.

Gingerbread man at Kay Bakery (Credit: Michael Donahue)

Samir Restrepo, owner of El Sabor Latino, is opening a second restaurant, El Pollo Latino, in September.

“El Pollo Latino” means “The Latin Chicken,” says Restrepo.

The restaurant, which will be at 3698 Summer Avenue, will feature oven-roasted chicken cooked on a rotisserie. “There are so many ingredients in there,” Restrepo says. “You’ve got to taste it. It’s not a spicy chicken, and it’s not going to be sweet. It will be something different.”

Restrepo got the recipe from his wife’s uncle, Eugenio Sanchez, who lives in Colombia and co-owns a chain of 30 El Fogon del Pollo restaurants that sell this type of chicken.

“I always wanted to bring something different to the city. I’ve been here for so many years. My two kids are from here,” he says.

Restrepo, who is from Cali, Colombia, lived in Miami for three years before moving to Memphis in 2003. “I see a lot of opportunity in Memphis. The quality of life. It’s cheaper than to live in Miami. And I know that Memphis is going to grow. At that time it was a small city. It was small to me because I moved from Miami.”

Restrepo and his wife, Yuri Guzman, and her parents Carlos Ruiz and Esneth Azevedo decided to open a Colombian restaurant in Memphis, with Guzman and Azevedo, who owned El Punto del Sabor restaurant in Colombia, as chefs. “When you go to Miami, you see 100 different Latin food restaurants. I wanted to try something here.

“We started at a fair on Winchester. We opened a tent just to try and see if people liked our food.” They ran the restaurant for two years at the fair, selling empanadas, plantains with cheese, and Colombian hamburgers.

They also sold a “bandeja paisa,” or “great plate,” which Restrepo describes as a “typical Colombian platter with pork belly, chorizo pork sausage, steak, rice, sweet plantains, avocado, red beans, and arepa, which is like a cornbread.

“We see that people like it. That’s why we were like, ‘Okay, let’s go on and try to open a restaurant and see how it goes.’”

On October 12, 2015, they opened El Sabor Latino or “The Latin Flavor” at 665 Avon Road. Business was slow at first. People who go to Mexican restaurants are already familiar with the food. “You know what a taco is, what a fajita is,” he says. But Colombian cuisine is “something different. People were just tasting and learning about the food. The first three years it was hard until people knew the food.”

Among the fare customers came to know was the Colombian hamburger, Restrepo says. “We put a lot of secret ingredients on the meat, and we put a pineapple with it, which makes it different.” The burger comes with bacon, cheese, lettuce, and cooked onions. “We also put potato chips on the burgers,” he says.

There’s also a Colombian hot dog on the menu, with pineapple, bacon, mayonnaise, mustard, and potato chips on top. The bun is different from the bun most people are familiar with, Restrepo says. “We bring the recipe for the bread from Colombia. It’s kind of soft. It’s not sweet.”

They also sell Colombian breakfasts, including the “desayuno campesino,” or “farmer’s breakfast,” which features scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes, beef sausage, rice, and “dedos de queso,” or “cheese bread.”

El Pollo Latino is only five minutes away from El Sabor Latino, so Restrepo will be able to quickly travel between the two.

As for opening a third restaurant some day, Restrepo says, “It’s in God’s hands. It’s on him. He gives us all the help. If he wants us to do another one, we’ll do it.”