Haaland Had Seconds

It was one of those sweltering July days, when the restaurant kitchen transformed from a room into its own microclimate. I was in Cardiff, in my Venezuelan partner’s restaurant, cooking for a fundraiser called Eat for Venezuela. We’d put the night together after the June earthquakes hit a country already a decade into economic crisis, with the money going to World Central Kitchen and Alimenta la Solidaridad. From nine in the morning until the last plates went out, I cooked beside Venezuelan women, folding empanadas, blitzing avocado and herbs into guasacaca, and braising asado negro until the sauce went the colour of strong coffee.

Two well-known food media figures, neither of them Venezuelan, had asked to put a dish of their own on the menu: longaniza de Tovar, a sausage from Colonia Tovar, a mountain town founded by German immigrants in 1843. They prepped it, yet the Venezuelan women cooked it and served it. Ten years in professional kitchens and on television sets have taught me how nights like that get remembered: by the names that are already recognised. In my experience, that is how British hospitality works, with immigrants’ skills made to disappear into the food and their names quietly dropped out.

Venezuelans are some of the newest arrivals at Britain’s table. More than seven million people have left Venezuela in little over a decade, and only a fraction have made it here. “People don’t know anything about Venezuelans,” Julia, from Caracas, told me, “because we’re only just arriving.” Yet in that short time, Venezuelan women have built much of what Britain knows of their cuisine. When Venezuelan businesses are covered in the media, the focus tends to fall on the brand or the men behind it. Read past the headlines and you find the women leading. Their stories that keep returning home: recreating it, starting from it or feeding it from a distance. The sociologist and food historian Krishnendu Ray warns against seeing immigrants “as only laboring” and so missing their role in the “naming of restaurants, designing menus, and reproducing foods, flavors, and ambience”. That is exactly the work these women are doing.

Kathe Cunin’s story began with homesickness. She came to London to study in the late 2000s, missed arepas, and tracked down the only stall selling them in Camden Market, where Gus Salguero was behind the counter. In 2013, the two of them co-founded Arepa & Co. Cunin ran its finances and operations for nearly thirteen years as it grew into what the trade press calls, “the UK’s only Venezuelan casual dining brand”, with a flagship at the heart of Latin London. She told About Time magazine she wanted “to create a space where Londoners can feel like they are in a Venezuelan home”. She left this spring and now works for Empresas Polar, the company behind Harina P.A.N., the maize flour found in most Venezuelan kitchens, at home and abroad.

Mia Mendoza started in her actual home. After working at a hotel bar in Manchester, she began selling arepas out of her fourth-floor flat in Chinatown. In 2019, she told Manchester Confidential how her days began as early as 6 am, when she would go out to buy meat, fill up her suitcase and haul it up four floors at her apartment, where the lift was frequently broken. Just as word spread, her landlord shut her operation down, and mid-pandemic, she found herself cleaning for a living until a pitch came up at Piccadilly Gardens.

She now cooks at Freight Island, where she gets to run her own menu. One arepa, stuffed with bacon, egg, cheese and tomato, is called the “Musiua”, an affectionate Venezuelan word for a foreigner. It’s almost like the English fry-up, just stuffed in a pocket made of masarepa with a Venezuelan name. In 2024, Manchester City invited her to make arepas for the first team; Erling Haaland, by her account, didn’t stop at two. The event was covered by a Spanish-language news channel, with a headline focusing on Haaland’s appetite and Mia described as an anonymous “Venezuelan woman”.

In Nottingham, Clara Cristina of Mmm! Time to Enjoy has been introducing the English to cachitos, the soft rolls of every Venezuelan bakery. The hardest part, she says, was explaining “the meaning and the tradition”, creating a menu that has stayed true to its roots.  One spinach-filled cachito was renamed the GreekChito, because it was easier to say and the spinach made customers think of Greece, “but otherwise (it) is the same flavours, without variation.” Women like her, Clara says, “don’t always receive the visibility that matches the effort”. In her view, being a migrant isn’t a limitation, “it’s your distinguishing mark.” 

Further north in Scotland, the woman behind La Bodega, a Venezuelan café in Glasgow’s Dennistoun, arrived in the country as a young adult who could barely follow the accent.  She packed away her dream of owning a food business for years. Building it, she says, cost “a lot of hours and time spent away from my child”, and taught her something few people warn you about: “how much your credit history decides whether you’re eligible for a business loan”. At La Bodega, she adapted her dishes to Scottish taste, for instance, taking the coriander out of her meat stock. “In my household we always cooked with what we had,” she says, “so I never felt it was too much of a compromise.” 

If Arepa & Co introduces Londoners to Venezuela, Liqui Liqui, the restaurant and shop co-founded by Erika Urvina, is where Venezuelans go to find it again. Isabel, a chef who has lived outside Venezuela for 28 years, shared that a trip there for frozen tequeños is “an act of belonging, because going there is like being in Venezuela and the language is food.” Everywhere else, Venezuelans find themselves translating their food for other people. At Liqui Liqui, it is the language everyone already speaks.

When “home” itself is in trouble, the women’s first act of care is to cook. After the earthquakes, many Venezuelans in Britain responded in the most practical way they knew, by cooking for fundraisers — our night in Cardiff and an evening of music, art and food in Glasgow among them. In September, Kenya Arias of Madres, a supper club named after the Spanish word for mothers, cooked a fundraising dinner in a fellow Venezuelan’s London home. All ticket sales were donated to Hogar Bambi, a Venezuelan children’s charity. The oven died that morning, so the pork was baked at the neighbours’, and dinner went ahead anyway. For a relatively young immigrant community, that is what solidarity looks like: someone cooks, a room fills, and donations are sent back home.

The name, Arias told me, began as a running joke: friends kept calling her and her wife their mums, “because we looked after them every time they came to our house”. The idea was to give people “a home outside their home”. However fashionable supper clubs have become, recognition is unevenly shared. It comes faster, Arias has found, to cooks with “the backing of a restaurant’s name” or an existing following online. Without that, selling every ticket takes “an extra layer of effort”. What she hopes to leave behind is a place of her own, where she knows her regulars by name.

Part of the reason this work goes unseen is the way it’s learned. Ask any of these women for a recipe and you get the same answer. “I always find it very difficult to give a recipe for arepas,” says Rosa, who has lived in the UK for 16 years. “It is something that you know, you feel, you see.” When Julia asked her aunts for theirs, they told her to come over and cook with them. Knowledge like that takes years to learn and presents itself as instinct. As Ray explains, the ethnic cook is treated as the “native speaker”, fluent by birth, while the chef is the “acknowledged foreign-language expert”.

Migration puts that knowledge at risk. Seven out of ten of Julia’s relatives have now left Venezuela. “Something gets lost along that road,” she says. So, the women purposefully hold on to it. When her grandmother started getting older, Isabel got their family together, helped her write down her recipes and printed them as a little book, although some dishes can’t be saved on paper. Hallacas, the Christmas parcels of maize dough, stew and plantain leaf, are close to impossible to make on your own, so Isabel, who once made them with blood relatives, now makes them with chosen family in the UK. She keeps the tradition alive by cooking with others.

Venezuelan women are up against a system far older than the arepa’s arrival here. Ray calls it “the hierarchy of taste”. Some cuisines, he shows, are written about “in aesthetic terms of taste and notions of skill”; the food of immigrants is filed instead as “the low-status product of the labor and implicit knowledge of the immigrant poor”, a matter of necessity and “undifferentiated toil”. The hierarchy can shift. Italian food, Ray notes, eventually “exited the ethnic category and entered haute cuisine”, but climbing it takes decades, and someone must do the work. Venezuelan food has found, as Isabel puts it, “its public”. The effort is everything that the public never sees: the suitcase hauled up the stairs, the shifts fitted around other jobs, the oven borrowed on the morning of a fundraiser. It is also the part that rarely makes the headline.

We tend to think of legacy as what’s left behind once the work is done. A name over the door, a cookbook, a recipe card with a name on it. For most, the legacy is the work itself — it’s knowledge carried across oceans and generations. It is the kind of inheritance that never makes the menu, and the reason there’s a menu at all.

Quotes from Clara Cristina, Kenya Arias and La Bodega are from interviews with the author; Clara Cristina’s and Arias’s are translated from Spanish. Julia, Rosa and Isabel are pseudonyms; their words are drawn from the author’s ongoing research with Venezuelan women in the UK. All other details are drawn from published interviews and reports.