Mi Apá Latin Café
Mi Apá Latin Café
A Restaurant Review
By MIKE WALKER
Mi Apá Latin Café
114 SW 34th St
Gainesville, FL 32607
(352) 376-7020
Mi Apá is a small Latin café in the Westgate Shopping Center off of 34th Street in Gainesville. Though apparently considered overall as a "Cuban" restaurant, they have expanded into pan-Latin food with great results. Aside from Cuban staples and foods common to the islands in general (plantains, yuca), Mi Apá now has a vast variety of Venezuelian and Columbian arepas, which are cornmeal patties that are cooked and then stuffed with a variety of fillings from cheeses to seasoned beef to combinations of chicken, black beans, sauces... pretty much you name it! The arepas are very tasty small meals and the variety Mi Apá has on hand has impressed my latin friends greatly. In a city of Gainesville's size where you won't find, in example, a dedicated Columbian restaurant, but with Gainesville's broad population, it still makes sense to bring aboard these non-Cuban foods.
If you order a main dish that comes with the choice of two sides, it can be tricky to pick only two from the options provided: moro rice, white rice, yellow rice, black beans, yuca, and plantains fixed a number of ways all are very tasty choices, after all. Sandwich choices-lighter fare that do not include the side dishes above-are also traditional and of high quality. The medianoche (a type of Cuban sandwich named for the fact it is often eaten as a midnight snack) is especially good. Considering the ample list of conventional dishes, the aprepas, the sandwich options, and various sides and soaps and such on offer, the selection at Mi Apá is certainly varied.
Beyond Mi Apá's selection however, what matters most is their quality: I have never had any dish there which was not of a high caliber. The ropa vieja (shredded flank steak with rice and black beans) is tender and perfectly seasoned while the arepas, which have become my standard order now, are always amazingly yummy. Mi Apá also carries latin soft drinks and pastries so the experience of eating in a small latin cafe is very much complete: the food served here would not in the least be out of place in Miami or Fort Lauderdale and is every bit as good as you'd expect in a larger metro area with a considerble Hispanic population. Their empanadas-small turn-overs (either baked or fried) filled with a meat or other stuffing-also are tasty and perfectly cooked with ample meat filling high on seasoning but not overly salty (liberal use of salt, alas, is a common problem with empanadas, it seems). Everything seems very fresh: in fact, Mi Apá is apparently owned by the same people as a Latin grocery up the street from what I have heard and this may play into their ability to readily garner fresh produce and other supplies. In any case, everything is fresh and even the more exotic foodstuffs seem to always be in fine form.
The waitstaff at Mi Apá also deserves mention and high praise: almost all of them appear to be college-aged Latin Americans, mostly female, who are pleasent and know the menu like the proverbial backs of their hands. You will hear as much if not more Spanish spoken in Mi Apá by the staff and patrons alike but don't let that scare you off if you don't know Spanish: many of their customers appear to speak only English and the staff is equally adept at English and very willing to go over the menu and explain any dishes that are confusingly exotic or seem unclear. Some of the girls even have name-tags with the flag of their home nation (e.g., Columbia) below their names-a nice touch. (The males who work there seem to not wear these name-tags: whether they dislike them or are all from America or avoid them for another reason is unknown.)
Mi Apá does most of its business, it appears, in dine-in and take-out but there is also a drive-thru (left over from the space's former occupation by KFC but put to good use by the current owners). The food is not what I would call fast food but it's nothing fancy either and might best be considered as latin comfort food or home-cooking. Probably, a lot of the take-away business here is from Hispanic families looking for affordable, tasty, simple food for lunch or dinner. Brunch on the weekends seems to draw a crowd, also.
MIKE WALKER is a Gainesville-based writer and journalist who often writes about ecology, travel, natural history, and related concerns for this and other regional and national news media. He may be reached at: cloudrace@prontomail.com
