Hello Arepa

Hello Arepa’s food is good, but not good enough that I’m dying to rush back and eat arepas all day erryday. I had the black bean/​feta arepa, with the addition of some guacamole/​avocado situation (cost extra), which was very tasty. I liked the corn/​texture of the arepa itself. It was yummy, but it wasn’t terribly filling.
Service was relatively prompt. I’ve been to some food trucks where it takes them an obscenely long time to get food out to customers. My arepa came out right away. Price was fair (a bit on the high side for what you got, but about on par with other food trucks).
Worth trying, but perhaps not repeat-​visiting/​binge-​eating.

Goodbye, Arepa.
Aww, I really want to rate this place higher because the guys running it are soooooooooooo nice. I don’t think they’re the owners, I just think they’re like, totes in love with the owners or something because they could not stop talking about how great the owners and the products are.
Now I am one of the biggest arepa fans you’ll ever find. It’s one of my fave foods (much like the Mexican Gordita) and I seriously have orgasms — in my pants — several times — multiples I mean — seriously — when I eat a good Arepa. Even a half decent Arepa will get the job done for me.
This might have been the worst Arepa I ever had. It was a «white person» Arepa, for starters, as in, everything in it tasted so white, I can’t imagine it ever being served in South America (yes I f***ing love it there and will be going back soon, esp if the glamour model that took me there before wants to take me there again, so to speak, hint hint if she’s reading). It just seems like a very Americanized version of the food.
I don’t want to go on and on about how bad it is, because firstly I know a lot of you love it, and secondly it’s all a matter of opinion anyway. I give three stars because I support family businesses and I like the idea of the truck. I’d never eat these dry, tasteless, white person arepas again, but I fully support everyone who is a big fan of the place and hope it continues to be successful for a very long time. It’s like a «hummus pita» which has nothing to do with Middle Eastern cuisine at all. Very popular with college kids and such, but as someone who adores the real thing, I really can’t get into it and find it bland.
But like I said… lovely people, and there’s a good chance you’ll like it, especially if you don’t know what Arepas are supposed to taste like.
And don’t expect to find Ice T here, or P Diddy for that matter. He’s Arapper, not Arepa. You have to understand this subtle difference before you can sleep with a Venezuelan. I mean before you can appreciate an Arepa.

I really wanted to love Hello Arepa’s food, but I was really disappointed. I ordered the ham and cheese arepa and it reminded me of a bad McMuffin sandwich. The corn flatbread was dry and the ingredients inside were flavorless. It didn’t seem authentic or worth the price. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t recommend this food truck.

I love arepas. my college best friend’s mom was from Venezuela and she would occasionally make them for us. I also was lucky that one of my favorite bars in my college town was owned by Venezuelans, so we would get delicious late night arepas.
This food truck makes a decent enough arepa, they tend to be less «puffy» than the usual Venezuelan arepa, but the flavor is quite good.
However I have yet to find fillings that blow me away. Don’t get me wrong, they are not bad, but I have yet to be fully impressed by them.
Then there are the plantain chips, they are inconsistent with the quality, They range from really good and crispy, to mushy and not quite seasoned.
What they have going for them is their additional dressings. The pico de gallo and sriracha mayo can turn a rather meh arepa and turn it into something delicious and spicy and fresh. The sriracha mayo can also rescue a disappointing plantain chips plate. So ask for Pico de gallo and/​or sriracha mayo. It greatly improves the arepas.

Some of the food you get from the food trucks are heavy piles of greasy goodness. Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes you want something that’s not going to weigh heavily, literally. I got the Carnivore Arepa. It was light, delicate and delicious, and I didn’t feel like I needed a nap afterwards. (Again, nothing wrong with that, but not all the time.)

Pretty good stuff, looking at mine and the surrounding arepas I would wager they got jipped. I had about twice as much tofu filling as they did their ingredients. We all agreed that the arepas could have used a fresh bite, something to add texture and dimension (tomato, fresh onion, shredded lettuce, pickled something). We added some of the pico de gallo which was a fare to mid improvement.
I would recommend any of them with cheese if you are eating standing up or in front of anyone. Since it’s a food truck in public places I doubt you are hovering over a sink or in your tub. Go for cheese they seemed to retain their shape. The 3 cheese was tasty, not too much cheese and quite salty with the primary cheese being feta. Kudos to them for being friendly for vegan, vegetarian, lactose and gluten folks. It was expressed that there is currently a world wide plantain shortage :(

I had the Vegan Hello Plate, which is a variation of the Vegetarian Hello Plate, which itself is a spin on a Garbage Plate. It’s an arepa topped with plantain chips, black beans, bbq tofu, pico, and daiya mozzarella cheese. They leave out the sriracha mayo but there is a bottle of plain sriracha available.
The food was great. While I thought it would all come in one big heap, the beans, tofu, and chips were in separate piles, so you could mix and match the ingredients. The arepa is burried under everything, so it doesn’t play a starring role in the dish, but everything works really well together. My only complaint is that the daiya isn’t melted; I’m not in the habit of eating it raw so I just stirred it in with the other ingredients. The whole point of daiya is that it melts. I’d rather see a fresh almond or cashew cheese if there’s no melting involved, but I know that’s asking a lot.

Love these guys, and the loaded plantain chips are not to be missed!
Definitely worth a lunch run; any option you choose will be delicious, although my personal favorite is the Token Carnivore.
This great team is also one of the few that operates over the winter, so their deliciousness is available year round.

Arepas are amazing! I drove from downtown to try my first arepa when the truck was parked off of East Ave today. Totally worth it.
Larissa (so friendly!) was at the window and she and Christina recommended I try the chorizo one as an arepa newbie.
For starters the whole sandwich/​wrap is a perfectly crispy & creamy almost polenta-​y tortilla. Corn pancake is a great way to describe it.
The inside has a nice sliced chorizo. Spicy and yummy. Not hands down the best chorizo I’ve ever had, but quite good.
Then there was delicious pico de gallo — perfectly balanced tomato, onion & cilantro. There was also this delicious avocado cream sauce in the arepa that was SOO good (I’m a sucker for avocado).
The cheese was very melty and good. Nothing super unique there, but a nice glue for the arepa.
The arepa was also perfectly wrapped in aluminum foil to ensure no leakage, which I really appreciated.
We will be back! Can’t wait to try some others!

Hello Arepa! is something I can’t help but shout out whenever I see the big orange truck parked somewhere. Very much at the forefront (with a select handful of peers) of the burgeoning food truck scene in Rochester, Hello Arepa offers something much different than the majority of the other vendors. Their mostly Vegan /​Vegetarian menu, which is entirely Gluten Free offers reprieve for those who often struggle to find such options in a fast food environment. There are plenty of places to get a greasy burger, but only one arepa truck in Rochester.
The arepa itself is a bit of a mystery here in the Northeast. I had never actually even heard of them until I saw these guys at a Rodeo back in 2012. I love anything that even remotely resembles a sandwich, so I was in instant heaven. Since then, I’ve tried arepas in many other cities, and even a few of its native countries, and I was shocked at the variation in texture and consistency between different venues. Some are thick, some are thin, some are chewy and some are dry — but I think the Hello Arepa truck has some damn good arepas! A slight crust on the outside, with just a hint of buttery goodness, and a warm, somewhat-​creamy inside. Great. Every. Time.
I’ve seen them at the Public Market on weekends, outside of Joe Bean, and of course at the Rodeos, along with a slew of other places around the city. I have eaten there maybe 6 – 7 times and the food is always quite consistent. They have a variety of different options, such as the black bean and feta (surprisingly rich), the ham-​cheese-​sriracha mayo is really good also with some avocado, but the BBQ tofu is crazy good! And let me say I am a devout meat-​eater, but that tofu changed my mind about the alternative proteins out there. They also have plantain chips with feta that my fiancé and I both love (also awesome with a little sriracha mayo!) we get those almost every time. They also have a Hello Plate now, which every Rochestarian should be obligated to try!
Speaking with the owner, he has a great personality and a genuine passion for what he’s doing. They use as many local ingredients as they can, and make everything fresh for each service, which is right inline with my personal philosophy. I think they’re on the right track as far as food goes, and I think the massive line they continuously have at the Rodeos is a testament of that. It would just be nice to see these trucks out and about more often. Fortunately, I think the city council is finally beginning to move its feet in a positive direction for the trucks.

Hello Arepa is one of many beneficiaries of an incredibly inefficient arepa market. What I mean is that so few arepa joints exist in Rochester, in Buffalo, anywhere, that (in this case) the commodity itself, an as of yet rather unexplored, poorly documented but exotic item, is so scarce that prices are artificially inflated with quality, or lack thereof, barely in consideration.
My basis for reviewing this Rochester-​based truck is its foray down the I-​90 to my still-​beleaguered hometown of Buffalo, New York in an effort to capitalize on the scores of suckers who patronize Larkin Square Food Truck Tuesday, shoving down overpriced food and wasting hard-​earned green. See, I was one of those suckers. See, I have good memories of homemade arepas cooked for me in friends’ kitchens in Astoria and Cobble Hill. See, I ordered a «Token Carnivore» arepa, priced at $ 6.50, an arepa advertising contents of «ham, cheese, and Siracha mayo.» I thought that there must be something else in it. Nope! They got me! Ha!
For less than $ 6.50, you can get a footlong sandwich at Subway plus with all manner of pre-​sliced veggies and a drink at lunchtime! For $ 6.50, I could order pita pockets chock full of falafel and all manner of pickled veggies. For that price, I could buy a sushi lunch. I could buy a pound of fruit. I could buy multiple tacos, multiple hot dogs (the gourmet ones), multiple chicken wings even at Buffalo’s absurdly priced chicken wing festival.
But the idea of paying six American dollars and 50 American cents for what amounts to basically a very small cold cut ham, processed cheese, and mayo sandwich? A sandwich so small that I might have to eat three, spend nearly an Andrew Jackson to actually constitute a meal? Abhorrent. Abominable. Execrable. I would have been off at any other of those terrible trucks, in fact ate a full burger and all my fries at the pub I visited subsequently.
So I looked up prices of arepas in joints in New York City. Not many of ‘em out there. Aside from Spanish Harlem joints and south Brooklyn joints, most of the prices ran about the same. So let’s head back to that discussion of inefficient markets. In 2004 as I left for college the first time, I bought a laptop computer for $ 1,600 that boasted less than 20 gigs of space, 64 megabytes of RAM, and a CD drive. No floppy disk drive, oh boy. This was by no means top of the line either. It was one of Dell’s basic models. Over the ensuing years, technology improved, prices fell. Nowadays, you can get a great computer suitable for accomplishing pretty much every reasonable daily function for less than $ 300. Nowadays, many of the companies that used to sell computers so well in the olden days (i.e. Gateway) are completely gone. Others, like Hewlett Packard and Dell, are barely hanging on. This is what happens as markets become more efficient.
So here’s what will happen. As time winds on and more arepa places spring up in the U.S., the prices will drop. Those providing inferior product will inconspicuously vanish, their owners perhaps slightly more comfortable financially. (Can’t fault a guy for making a living, right?)
My prediction as I look down that road? Goodbye, Hello Arepa.

Tried an arepa at the recent Food Truck Rodeo and I was not impressed. The version I tried was black bean and feta. As another Unilocaler mentioned, it was messy and hard to eat. Flavors were OK, but I didn’t feel like they made the black bean filling any better than I could’ve at home. Of course, I wouldn’t made the arepa itself, but that wasn’t a standout to me. It was bland and didn’t have any real discernable texture (certainly not crunchy in any respect, closer to the untoasted English muffin that someone else described it as). Certainly NOT worth the $ 6.50 I was charged, for which I could’ve gotten an actual sandwich at another food truck or – my preference — a huge helping of delish poutine from LPP. Maybe the other varieties are better, but at those prices I won’t be trying any of them.

Omg I love this food truck, please come to state street! I have been raving about you ever since the east end fest! I am so sick of going to different places with the same menu. Everything is so predictable lately, but Hello Arepa was the perfect fix to this problem!
I had a ham and cheese with avocado. The arepa was amazing. Since it was the first time i ever had one, i don’t have anything to compare it to, other then I remember eating it and thinking it tasted like an English muffin and a pancake mixed together (I hope that’s ok to say). I honestly, don’t like ham, but the options were slim (something I would like to see change), and this one sounded the most appealing to me. I devoured it. It was really amazing, I also added the saracha mayo, what a great mix with everything. The price was fair, the staff was great and the food was really really amazing. I can’t wait to see them again so I can try something new… or stick with the ham!

I love arepas, and Hello Arepa is a fantastic example of what an arepa should be — a bit crunchy, a bit creamy, a bit messy, and totally delicious. My fave is the black bean with avocado. Arepas are a soul-​satisfying comfort food.
And the plantain chips — all I can say is order them and see how freaking delicious they are. I am not typically a huge plantain fan — usually too sweet. But these are just absolutely perfect.

Hello Arepa introduces Venezuelan style arepas to Rochester, a great addition to the local food truck scene, and local foods in general. Their grilled-​then-​baked stuffed cornmeal patty has a chewy, creamy consistency that has to be experienced to appreciate why it is such a favorite Latin American comfort food. It lends itself as a delicious vehicle for an infinite variety of tasty stuffings.
I would recommend trying the black bean feta. The black bean is a rich compliment to the cornmeal, and the feta adds some saltiness. I expect Hello Arepa will offer interesting combinations as time goes on. I am very excited about the food truck scene finally maturing in Rochester, it adds another dimension to an already impressive culinary landscape (relative to our size). Lend your support to the efforts of the food truck community to work with the city on all the related zoning issues, etc.

I’m a sucker for food trucks, as is my boyfriend (seeing as he works on one), so when we were in Rochester for the day, we made it a point to check out a food truck for lunch.
One thing the Rochester food trucks need to work on is advertising where they are every day! We couldn’t find the location for half of them on their website or social media page.
I told Brad that we should check out the farmer’s market because I knew the Chowder truck was there at least, and we ran into Hello Arepa on the way
We both split the 3 Cheese Arepa. I thought it was very rich, I could only have a few bites, but I am not a huge fan of Feta, so don’t let this review deter your choice.
I thought I would come back here possibly. It was pretty cheap. I do think the way they take your order and give food is odd. They order-​taker is in the middle of the truck window with people having to work around her. I think she should be on one side, and the orders are given at the other. Also, they give you a card with a number on it and call out the card when your order is ready. I think this takes away from really interacting with the customer, and they will never learn returning customer’s names.

I like food trucks, actually I love them. I love yummy food and I like the idea of being able to pick your kitchen up and go to where the people are. To feed people and make them happy, isn’t that why those of us who like to cook, LIKE to cook? For me to recommend a food truck it usually needs at least one of three things, preferable 2. 1) cheaper than a restaurant. You may have expenses but you don’t have as many as a brick and mortar place. 2) A larger portion than a restaurant, same reason. 3) Something truly unique or amazing that I can’t get elsewhere.
Hello Arepa has something unique that I can’t get elsewhere. Bu, t I did not find it amazing, I was sold a $ 4 average size english muffin made from corn instead of wheat. Tasted ok, Kind of like grits. To add cheese or meats doubled the cost and I don’t think it would hold very much. If these things cost a $ 1 I would talk them up all day but I can’t imagine the $ 4 english muffin that would get my to come back again.
I say definitely pass on hello Arepa.

I had the liberty of trying Hello Arepa at the Food Truck Roundup in Henrietta a little while back. Unfortunately, due to my desire to test out all the other food trucks, I wasn’t able to experience the truest flavors of Hello Arepa per the suggestions from my fellow Unilocalers below. (Specifically Laura’s tip to get the Plantain Chips — dying to try!!)
Anyway, I think the location made it difficult to eat. We were squatting on the curb of a parking lot trying shoo away the seagulls from pecking at our food. That position made it tough to eat with fork and knife. I think just eating it whole would have been better, but a little messy — a good messy! Regardless, the arepa was tasty. I love corn tortillas and this is a nice version with the corn dough flavor — like a blend of taco tortillas and corn bread (and apparently gluten free!) I shared the Domino with my boyfriend — black beans and feta. It’s always so interesting to find how different flavors emerge in variations of Mexican & South American foods. While most dishes include beans, cheese and a tortilla of some sort, they’re all unique. And, this arepa was unlike anything I’ve tried. Now, I’m curious to try more Venezuelan dishes and wish we had a restaurant in town. Hello Arepa, if you outgrow your food truck, I’ll be first in line at your restaurant :)
Either way — if you can find them, visit their truck! I follow them on Twitter for updates.

11−24−12, found the truck off University Ave. The Tres Quesos was really good, the Token Ham and Cheese is fair, I’d pass on that one next time. Don’t know if it was the cold weather or if I was frozen, but they would have been more enjoyable if they were warmer, just a bit. But hey, they’re a dish from more temperate climes. (3.75 stars)

Hello Arepa opened in September of 2012 and has been rolling around ever since. With only one steady gig thus far (5−8pm at Roc Brewing Co), they are catching on slowly but surely… kinda like the food truck scene in Rochester.
I moseyed over last night, ravenous for a delicious arepa. For those of you who don’t know what an arepa is, let me break it down: it’s a corn dough and cooked into a pancake-​ish bread. It can be grilled, fried, baked or boiled. People love some arepas in Columbia and Venezula. I believe Hello Arepa specializes in Venezulan arepas.
They’ve got about 7 different arepas to enjoy:
–Ham/​Cheese + sriracha mayo $ 6.5
–Black beans/​feta $ 6.5
–Margarine $ 4
–Black beans/​eggs/​cheese $ 7
–Three cheese $ 5
–BBQ Tofu– $ 6.5
A side of plantain chips with feta and sriracha mayo ($ 3) are definitely worth it. They are perfection– some are crisp, some a softer… yummers. I could have handled more feta though. I wouldn’t mind a bit more heat with the sriracha mayo.
As for the arepa itself (I got the dominó (black beans/​feta) with avocado (extra .50 and totally worth it). It was warm, tasty and a complete mess to eat. They give you a fork for good reason. I needed three hands for this thing. Filling was splattering all over me. I’ve had arepas that aren’t cut all the way though and that could help with the mess. The arepa was tasty, not mind blowing (more salt/​spices please!), but totally quality…
The couple in the food truck were super friendly and the kind of people you just want to make it.
I plan to go back and try a few more arepas… I mean, where else can I get my arepa fix in Rochester?
TIPS: Vegan/​Vegetarian friendly (they have dairy free cheeses!). They can take CARDS! Check their facebook for truck locations and events!