The Unvegan

It’s not often you find a Venezuelan restaurant. Considering the country’s brutal recent history, it’s no surprise that Venezuela is better-known for kidnapping than cuisine. Yet, in Bloomfield resides a restaurant called Adolfo’s purporting to offer Venezuelan food. Plus, since it’s Bloomfield it also cooks up Italian for some reason.

Each meal begins with complimentary sangria, which is so much better than kidnapping. It’s also a BYOB spot with a $5 corkage, so I brought some wine to join the sangria. After that we started off the eating with some arepas. These are essentially corn (maize) meal pockets stuffed with whatever the place is offering that day. On this day, we chose the shredded chicken with cheese, which also came with an aioli for some added flavor. Sadly there was a random piece of lettuce and sliced tomato on the plate, but they didn’t hurt the arepas. These were some pretty tasty arepas with a sizable amount of cheese and chicken inside. The dough itself was also mighty good.

For my real meal I went with their Pabellon Criollo – a pretty traditional Venezuelan dish according to my research. Like the cuisine of many other Latin American countries, this dish is essentially rice, beans, shredded beef and plantains. In these case, the plantains were sweet with a nice slight crisp, the beans were black and cheesy and the shredded beef was perfectly seasoned. In short, this was a delicious meal.

Nonetheless, I should point out that those of my friends who ordered from the Italian part of the menu weren’t as happy as I was. They didn’t dislike their meals, but Pittburgh simply has much better Italian to offer. With Venezuelan, though, Adolfo’s might be it and it doesn’t disappoint.