Arepazo Latin Grill

Arepazo Latin Grill brings all of the things you love about the Downtown location of Columbus' global Latin favorite, and then they add tapas and a full bar. Carlos Gutierrez brings the same formula working at his Gahanna operation.

The space is open and inviting. It is much larger than the Downtown restaurant. There are plenty of options for vegetarians.

Like the other two locations, every dish tastes delicious smothered in the famous cilantro sauce. Dishes originate in Latin American countries in North and South America.

Vegetarians can order meatless arepas, patacons (a stuffed fried plantain boat), burritos, tostadas and three tapas for lunch. Dinner has a wider selection of meatless tapas options.

The bean and cheese empanada might be the best way to spend $3.75 eating in Columbus. The fried corn pocket is crammed full of black beans and white cheese until it's about the size of a small Nerf football. The appetizer is almost a lunch portion by itself.

A few of the vegetarian tapas involve perfect tostones, or fried plantain chips. Arepazo's tostones have a crispy exterior, but are thick enough to also display some of the fruit's softer textures. They are great served with a garlic aioli, and even better topped with roasted red peppers, parsley and slivers of Manchego.

Servers were able to answer questions about vegetarian items on the menu, and served multiple meals quickly enough to keep lunch crowds moving.

El Arepazo

I finally succeeded and took pictures while I was eating lunch at El Arepazo. They prepare Pan-Latin food that is made fresh and cheap with enough vegetarian options to keep you from repeating an item during the working week.

I have eaten here a number of times. Unfortunately, I kept forgetting to take my camera. The store is small, and both the inside and outside walls feature interesting art work. El Arepazo is located in the Pearl Alley by Gay and High Streets.

Carlos Gutierrez, the owner, does a virtual tour of food from the Spanish speaking New World. There are vegetarian burritos and empanadas on the menu, as well my personal favorites, the arepa and the patacon from Venezuela.

An arepa (pictured above), is a sandwich on grilled corn meal disks. The vegetarian arepa is made with lettuce, tomato, cheese, black beans, banana peppers and a pinch of the cilantro sauce. It also costs less than $5, tax included.

The patacon is a boat made of deep fried plantain stuffed with lettuce, tomato, black beans, avocado and cheese. It is delicious and enormous.

There are some great sides, including deep fried plantains, the delicious Cuban cousin of the banana that gets a caramel sweetness when cooked in oil. El Arepazo also has free delivery for lunch orders of greater than $10.

They are open Monday through Saturday, and it seems like their hours can be a little bit flexible (as in they open when they get around to it, not by the exact hours on the door). But the service is fast and the fare is affordable and well made.

El Arepazo has been featured in a number of other blogs (here, here and here), and rumors are swirling that Carlos and the owners of Due Amici are planning on collaborating on an upscale Latin venture. If it's half as good as El Arepazo, I'm there with bells on for opening night. Check out the pictures below.

El Arepazo

New Music and Bad Science

Today is the day that Radiohead is attempting to turn the music industry on its head. The influential band is releasing their new album "In Rainbows" on the Web, allowing users to pay whatever they want for their latest release, and the song "Jigsaw Falling into Place" is making everybody who paid for Britney Spears' "Gimme More" feel stupid for doing so.

A debate has broken out in the White House over the Israeli response to policy regarding North Korea and Syria. Cheney is on one side, Rice is on another, and Rush Limbaugh is still a fuckwit.

The Los Angeles Police Department is under fire for another controversial bout of violence, this time involving journalists and immigration rights protesters. Why can't the LAPD beat somebody who deserves it (like Lindsay Lohan, Stephen Baldwin or Kwame Brown) rather than their arbitrary pattern of nightsticking the wrong people?

New York is up in arms about the noose found on the door of a professor at Columbia University. While NYC would like to believe that they are ahead of everybody in the world, this incident demonstrates that the city is in fact about one year behind Jena, Louisiana. If they are going to lynch somebody at Columbia, perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have been a more fitting target for this kind of misguided aggression.

The battle between the Western world and people who practice goofy folkloric religions is coming to a head in Holland, where Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of gender discrimination in Islam, faces an uncertain future from extremists because of her comments about Dutch Muslims. When you need violence to prove your point, as is often the case with religious fundamentalists, you probably have no point at all. Hopefully a fundamentalist somewhere can focus their aggression against that tramp Ann Coulter and allow Hirsi Ali to demonstrate what life is like for a Muslim in the 21st century.

Finally, in off-beat news, on the heels of the Nobel Prizes being awarded, the Ig Nobel Awards are given to discoveries that make people laugh before they make them think. This year's winners include studies about the side effects of sword swallowing, Viagra as a cure for jet lag in hamsters, the "gay bomb," making vanilla scents from cow dung, and determining if rats can differentiate between languages spoken backward. Once again, science has proven that no avenue of research is too obscure to garner recognition