Saturday, September 10, 2022

Exotic/Disgusting Foods and Beverages Forum--A South American Meal

      About a month ago, on August 6, 2022 to be exact, I discussed a Nigerian meal I had while visiting a friend who lives in the Washington, D.C. area (Hi Dan, once again).  Well, we didn't just have the one exotic meal--we also got take out from Kumbia, a restaurant in Rockville, Maryland.  To be specific, I had the saltena appetizer, and the guatita entree.

    As so often happens, especially lately, it seems, the official Kumbia website was rather terse.  It essentially featured a list of their food and drinks, and then a link to their online ordering setup.  However, there were a few newspaper articles about it, so I was able to get some history about the place.  One of their co-founders, Steven Tobar, was until recently employed at the Cuban restaurant Cuba Libre.  He also enjoyed a local Spanish restaurant/bar/nightclub called La Tasca.  Alas, La Tasca was one of the many businesses that suffered during the COVID pandemic, and it closed in 2020.  Therefore, Tobar decided to open his own restaurant/bar/nightclub.  Tobar is Ecuadorian in heritage, and a friend of his, Alejandro Stoto, is Guatemalan.  The two decided not to specialize in one particular nation's cuisine, but instead make things a bit more diverse.  And so, their establishment serves food from throughout South America, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador.  They chose a name inspired by a Latin American musical style similar to reggae and salsa, called cumbia.  (Obviously they changed the spelling a little.)  As is the case with the Nigerian restaurant I recently spoke about (Eko House), Kumbia is brand new, having opened on March 19, 2022.  Unlike Eko, Kumbia's hours of operation are much more extensive, as it's open 7 days a week, and closes at 2 am. on weekend nights.

     Saltena is a traditional Bolivian dish, which is a type of baked empanada, that's filled with either beef, chicken, or pork, along with potatoes, raisins, olives, and a sweet and spicy sauce.  (The sauce is inside the pouches, too, not just poured over it.)  Oddly the precise inventor of this food is apparently known, at least according to historian Antonio Paredes Candia.  He credits Juana Manuela Gorriti with creating it, in the early 19th century.  Gorriti was an interesting lady aside from her culinary skills.  She was a battlefield nurse, writer, and feminist, and was also married to the Bolivan President Manuel Isidoro Belzu during the mid 1800's.  The name Saltena is because Gorriti was from the Salta region of Argentina originally.  Saltena is often considered a snack food, and as such is a common offering of street vendors.  Each region of Bolivia has their own variant of saltena.  There is also a vegetarian version.

    Guatita is a national dish of Ecuador.  It uses tripe (stomach) that has been cleaned in lemon juice brine, cooked until tender, cooled, and then chopped up and cooked again in a stew.  Traditionally the other ingredients of the stew include potatoes, and the resulting mixture is then covered in a peanut sauce.  The vegetarian kind uses wheat gluten instead of tripe.  (I didn't see a vegetarian and non-gluten variant listed, so I guess if you have celiac disease and are vegetarian, you're out of luck on this particular dish, unless you want to invent something on your own.)  Guatita is also thought to be a good food to treat hangovers with, which is why it's often served on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  For more information about tripe, please consult one of my earliest posts, on July 3, 2012.

 

Kumbia restaurant, saltena appetizer:  These looked kind of like pouches, with beef, peppers, and potatoes inside them.  Also there was the gravy, which was brownish.  It made eating them a little tricky, as you had to bite them at the top so the gravy didn't pour out.  There was also a tomato based sauce to put on them.  All in all, the beef was decent, and these were a good appetizer.  They kind of reminded me of Indian style samosas.


Kumbia restaurant, guatita entree:  This was pieces of beef tripe with potatoes, sweet plantains, and avocados, covered in a peanut sauce.  The tripe was spongy in texture, as it usually is.  I'm a fan of plantains, so they were a nice addition.  Overall it was okay, but a bit bland.  However, I had some of the Nigerian gizdodo (see my post on August 6, 2022) left, with its spicy tomato-y sauce.  I put that on the guatita, and that improved things significantly, as the spice bite meshed well with the tripe.  So without the spicy gizdodo it was only mediocre, but with it the result was pretty good.  Finally, I can't confirm whether or not guatita is good for hangovers, as I wasn't suffering from one when I tried it.


     Although I obviously didn't try these, Kumbia does serve several other items that I've covered before on the blog.  Namely, the Colombian drink aguardiente (see my post on January 9, 2021), and chicharrones (pork rinds, and see the March 13, 2021 post).  Due to the continuing pandemic, we did not eat inside Kumbia, so I can't comment on its atmosphere and artwork, service, or musical entertainment.  Overall, I would give it a 4.0 out of 5.0 rating.  Or, a definite recommend, especially if you want to have some South American cuisine.  I'd certainly be willing to eat there again, presumably on a future visit with my friend.  For the record, online the Google reviews for Kumbia were an average of 4.7 out of 5.0, on 82 reviews, and Yelp had them at 4.5 out of 5.0 on 21 reviews.




























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