location_on 3160 Spring St., Fairfax.
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When Gabriela Febres was a student at American University more than a decade ago, she seldom encountered other Venezuelans.
“I remember if I rode the Metro and heard someone speaking with a Venezuelan accent, I would be like, ‘Oh my God, I need to talk to this person!’ ” says Febres, who’d grown up mostly in South Florida, the center of the Venezuelan American community.
As more Venezuelans relocated to DC, Febres saw an opportunity. In 2011, she went into business with a friend, Ali Arellano, selling the distinctive dairy products of their country—slabs of squidgy queso de mano, elastic queso telita, and creamy suero Larense—through Facebook out of a fridge in their apartment.
Soon that turned into a cottage business called Antojitos de tu País. Febres and Arellano found Florida-based distributors for specialty Venezuelan ingredients and sold them to Washington-area venezolanos, along with prepared dishes like golden cachapas (corn griddle cakes) and sweet, puffy corn empanadas.
Next came Arepa Zone, which was born as a food truck in 2014 and now does a brisk business at locations across DC: La Cosecha and Western Market food halls, stalls at Nats Park and Audi Field, a fast-casual spot on 14th Street, and a College Park outpost coming soon.
Although it’s less widely known than Arepa Zone, Antojitos de tu País, which moved into a Fairfax commercial kitchen in 2015, is going strong. It has become a passion project for Febres and Arellano—with an almost entirely separate customer base.
Arepa Zone is where World Bank employees and Union Market shoppers try some of Venezuela’s most recognizable foods for lunch. Antojitos de tu País is an if-you-know-you-know kind of place.
Antojitos isn’t really in a restaurant space. Visiting the business for takeout involves looping around the back of a drab business park and parking among the garage-like bays that house auto shops and outlets to purchase tile or lumber. It’s a place built to fulfill large orders, not to look pretty.
But it’s where Venezuelans come to buy hard-to-find prepared foods, sometimes in party-size quantities: burnished buns called cachitos; candies remembered from South American childhoods; frozen tequeño cheese sticks to air-fry at home; blackened beef asado negro; anise-scented sticky buns called golfeados, topped with white cheese.
Antojitos’s customer base has grown as a more recent wave of Venezuelans has arrived in the US. Some start off delivering orders from the place (many of the motorbike delivery workers across DC are from Venezuela) and then become customers.
Around the holidays—the busiest time of year at Antojitos de tu País—a screen that looks well suited to monitor a NASA launch is illuminated with data on huge orders of traditional Christmas foods: trays of roasted pork pernil and shredded chicken salad, panes de jamón (bronze loaves cross-sectioned with a spiral of ham, raisins, and olives), and hallacas (tamales with stewed meat, raisins, and capers). Most of these are available year-round, too.
You’d be wise to wait until you’re planning to serve a crowd before coming to Antojitos de tu País, so you can take full advantage of the sizable takeout portions of empanadas, tequeños, and asado negro. But don’t forget to grab a warm cachito, filled with ham and cheese, for the drive home. And if you aren’t sufficiently sated, you’ll be glad to know the whole Arepa Zone menu is available here, too.
This article appears in the January 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
