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NYC Food Truck Lunch: Pabellon Salad Bowl From Metroarepas

Perry, the founder of New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City street food.

Last fall a new food truck came on the scene called Metroarepas that serves Venezuelan food. For our first visit, we enjoyed their namesake dish, the Metroarepa. For our return visit, we tried pabellon, described on the menu as a "traditional Venezuelan dish".

According to the menu, pabellon contains shredded beef, chicken or pork, white cheese and sweet plantains. We opted for the beef, which cost $12. The chicken and pork versions cost $10.

The other choice we had to make was a rice bowl or a salad bowl. In line with our recent attempt to eat healthier, we selected the salad bowl.

The woman putting my lunch together was very friendly and seemed to remember us from our last visit 5 months ago. She even said it's been a while since she last saw us. That's a pretty good memory for faces.

She put lettuce, tomato, cucumber, red bell peppers, black beans and coarsely grated white cheese into a large metal mixing bowl. A large serving of shredded beef was then added, and everything was mixed together well. Not sure what happened to the sweet plantains in the description, which were nowhere to be found. They would have been most welcome in this salad bowl.

An avocado sauce and a spicy sauce were both available, but we only asked for the avocado sauce, not being in the mood for something spicy.

The last piece of lunch was an arepa, a griddled cornmeal cake. For some dishes, they split open the arepa and stuff it, but in this case, it was meant like having bread on the side.

Arepa
(credit: Perry R.)

The arepa was delicious, especially on this cold day. It was crispy on the outside, soft and warm inside, and definitely warmed our insides too. It felt like the arepa could stay warm all day, if we needed it to.

It was a nice lunch having the cool, crisp salad interlaced with warm, shredded, beef. The meat had been cooked in a well seasoned tomato-based sauce, and was tender and tasty.

The avocado sauce however was quite thin, more of a salad dressing than a sauce. A lot of it ended up in the bottom of the container.

The pabellon salad bowl was very filling, especially for a dish over salad. Usually when we have a salad bowl, we're hungry by time late afternoon. Not in this case. This lunch held us until dinner.

The Metroarepa truck is a solid choice for lunch, whether you're familiar with Venezuelan food or not. If you're not, we suggest trying a metroarepa for your first visit, but so far, everything we've seen coming from the truck has looked and smelled delicious.

You can find Metroarepas on Twitter here, on Facebook here, and their website is here.

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