Nova Bakery

🇻🇪 VENEZUELA / From classic stuffed arepas to modern jaw-breaking burgers, all the street food in Caracas has a new home at this compact Long Beach restaurant.

🇻🇪 VENEZUELA
📍 865 E. 7th Street,
Long Beach, Harbor
🅿️ Street parking
🥤 No Alcohol

📸 All photos by Jared Cohee
for Eat the World Los Angeles

Tucked around the corner from the busy Alamitos Avenue and 7th Street intersection and slightly hard to notice, Long Beach’s newest South American food lives in a small nondescript storefront. On the opposite corner of the city’s Museum of Latin American Art, unfortunately there is no tricolor Venezuelan flag hanging from the front or even any hints of what is made inside until you get close enough to read the signs in the window.

Only there will the wide range of Venezuelan antojitos come into focus. If the kitchen is busy and the door is open, the meaty, cheesy fried goodness will also make its way outside via delicious smells. It is with great hope that the concept catches on here in Long Beach, because Nova Bakery is cooking some really tasty foods that are not that common throughout the Southland.

These AI-generated dogs love arepas!

The Venezuelan flag starts flying proudly once you get inside, on the wall art and even in the refrigerator on cans of the country’s beloved Frescolita strawberry-flavored soft drink. The menu boards above the kitchen only offer foods from back home and thankfully do not cater to what many in Long Beach and nearby areas would find more familiar.

While you will find antojitos with similar ingredients throughout Latin America, the cachapa is a uniquely Venezuelan food and a great start here at Nova Bakery. The idea is close to a quesadilla, a corn envelope folded over cheese. Just like arepas, you will find stands along almost every roadside in big cities and small towns with purveyors of this griddled goodness.

Nova offers them with chicken or beef, but the simple cachapa de queso ($11.99, above) is a good start. This modern version lets you ponder the dish’s vast history, which goes back well before South American colonization. Besides the overload of cheese, there is also plenty of butter seeping its way inside the cachapa.

A display case on the counter possibly hints towards the hopefulness of busier times with higher turnover, but for now just holds some disheveled paperwork. In Caracas, these cases would be full of various Venezuelan fried items like empanadas, pastelitos, and papas rellenas, all of which can be ordered here at Nova and seen on the plate below.