Alma Cocina Latina co-owners Irena Stein and Mark Demshak are at long last getting their arepa business off the ground this week, as they put the finishing touches on Candela, their yet-to-open arepa bar/sister spot adjacent to the restaurant in Station North.
As a tasty tease of what’s to come, they will serve arepas out of the kitchen window at Alma—their Venezuelan fine-dining establishment—until Candela debuts. (Stein can’t give an exact date, but says it will be “soon.”)
A soft opening for the arepa window will take place on Thursday, June 12, with official window service starting Saturday, June 14 in time for the Baltimore Pride Parade, the Charles Street Promenade, and Inviting Light events. (On June 14, the window will stay open from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. After that, it will operate Thurs.-Sat. from 5-8 p.m.)
The window, which is next door to Candela on Lanvale Street, will debut with three types of arepas made by Alma’s executive chef Hector Romero—cod and plantains; shredded chicken with avocado and cilantro; and roasted maitake mushrooms, plantains, and black beans with a spicy tomato-based sofrito criollo sauce.
Once Candela is open, there will be a rotation of arepas that highlight not only Venezuela, but flavors from around the globe.
“All of these will have the flavors of the tropics and the Caribbean,” says Stein. “We will start with the classic Venezeulan ones before we get to the international ones.”
The ancient round corn cakes are an important symbol of Venezuelan culture and a staple of the diet both in Venezuela and Colombia.
“This is our daily bread, and also the ambassador of our culture abroad, because of the eight million people who left the country and live all over the world,” says the Venezuelan-born Stein of the stuffed specialty that dates to 1,000 B.C. “It’s become like the taco—you put things in to showcase the ingredients of our country. But we want to highlight that the arepa fits into any culture, any gastronomy, really well.”
Stein was the first person to bring the beloved street food to Baltimore. Two years ago, she even wrote an arepa cookbook—the first of its kind in the world. Once Candela gets underway, it will allow locals to sample the book’s featured recipes.
“I am proud to say that I am the person who started arepas in Baltimore,” says Stein, who first sold them at her Café Azafrán inside the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins back in 2004. “We did food from all over the world, but every time we did arepas, whether we did 80 or 100, we would sell out in a matter of minutes.”
It was that enthusiasm from the public—namely a lot of astrophysicists and astronomers who begged her to open an arepa bar—that led to the opening of Alma in its original Canton location in 2015.
“It was going to be an arepa bar,” says Stein, “but it was too big, so we turned into a great Venezuelan restaurant.”
Shortly after moving to their current Station North location in 2020, Stein and Demshak took the corn cakes off the menu, because the kitchen was too small to produce such ambitious, high-end fare alongside arepas.
But once again, the public was begging for them. “We’ve come full circle now,” says Stein, laughing.
Though customers will have to wait a little longer for Candela to open, they will, finally, be able to get their fix of the handheld favorites at Alma’s temporary window, which Stein hopes can be a destination for people exploring the neighborhood.
“I am so happy that we are finally going to have arepas, because of the enormous demand,” says Stein. “They are going to be for people who are going to the movies, the symphony, The Parkway theater, the nightclubs, nearby Metro Gallery, or simply for neighbors. And they can come before or after performances or on the way to the train station.”