(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
East Villagers are living in a golden age of arepas. Last month Arepa Factory opened on Avenue A and now the longtime beacon of Venezuelan grub, Caracas Arepa Bar, has finally, finally started delivering. The news comes to us from the folks at DoorDash, a service we didn’t even know existed (hey, it’s hard to keep track of them all) until we got the heads up that, like David Chang’s Maple, they just expanded (in the case of DoorDash, to midtown). DoorDash’s inventory of restaurants runs pretty deep, from Taco Bell to Tacombi. But the addition of Caracas is what sells us on it — if you’ve spent any amount of time in line at their Rockaway location, you know their arepas are summer in a corn shell, so this is like having a ray of sunshine delivered straight to your dreary, drafty little cubicle.
We tried the service out yesterday and, unlike our first delivery from Fuku, it went off without a hitch — we ordered at 1:36 p.m. and the order came to our East Village office pretty much exactly in 45 minutes, as promised. (DoorDash also delivers to Greenpoint and Williamsburg, though not yet to Bushwick.) The Del Gato arepa was priced at $9.75, so about a buck more than in the restaurant, and there was a $1.99 delivery fee (minus 99 cents if it’s your first order) plus tax and tip. Not surprisingly, transportation rendered the arepa a bit soggier than what you’d get on the Rockaway boardwalk, but this is the price you pay for not having to get up off your beach towel. Er, swivel chair. Dammit.