“You never stop moving in the kitchen!” Ernesto García remarked as he sliced avocado, cooked tortillas, and directed employees.

Minutes later, one golden arepa filled with black beans, plantains, avocado, tomato, and crispy mozzarella lay plated on the bar of Rubamba, García’s High Street restaurant.

Rubamba is located at 25 High St. in New Haven.

Movement and change are the lived principles that García and his brother, Franco Gonzales, brought to Rubamba when they founded the restaurant on High Street in 2012.

Arepas are Rubamba’s most popular dish and García’s favorite to cook because of their versatility: “You can serve them with anything— quinoa salad, elote, veggies, sweet plantains,” he said. Rubamba’s pan-Hispanic menu offers both Colombian and Venezuelan arepas. The former involves mixing yellow masa (corn flour) and water into a cake that is cooked on a griddle. The latter uses white masa and goes in the deep fryer for three minutes on each side until delicately light and robustly flavored.

In addition to arepas, delicious tacos, empanadas, quesadillas, burritos, drinks, and surprise specials offer a wide array of options to choose from. The brothers also own three food trucks which are usually located on Cedar Street by Yale New Haven Hospital.

Take-out and delivery orders will prove crucial to the ability of local restaurants like Rubamba to weather the pandemic during the coming months as Covid-19 cases climb and cold weather sets in. Click here or call 203 – 773-0032 to order. Pick-up is available seven days a week: Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Sunday from noon to 8 p.m.

Chef García joined Guillermina Mendieta, who has worked as a cook at Rubamba for six years, to make not one but three special dishes for this interview.

Guillermina Mendieta makes fresh tortillas.

Mendieta first mixed yellow masa and water together to form the dough for the tortillas which would be used for both the quesadilla and tacos.

Once they reached the right consistency, she rolled out small balls of dough which she then flattened in a tortilla press.

“Guillermina has good hands. They’re special hands. They’re experienced,” García narrated as she masterfully slid the flat dough on the griddle. “It looks very simple to do, but it requires a lot of practice. That dough can easily fall apart.”

The restaurant started making their tortillas fresh once the pandemic hit in new efforts to draw attention and bring in business. From a customer’s perspective, it’s worth it: filled with mozzarella, epazote leaves, huitlacoche (a fungus which grows on corn ears, also known as “Mexican truffle”) and fried until marbled brown on the outside and melty within, the quesadilla instantly went to the top of my pandemic best hits list.

As someone who had never tried huitlacoche before, the meal measured the known comforts of rich, gooey cheese and crispy carbs with the novelty of the soft, slightly sour mushrooms and pungent herbs. “This is my favorite— you’ll never taste that flavor anywhere else,” García said of the huitlacoche.

The quesadilla meets the emotionally confused moment we’re still living through— one where we require consolation through familiarity while aching for new experiences— and makes everything feel astonishingly okay, if only for a minute. Which is approximately the amount of time the dish lasted before being gobbled up by this reporter.

Once the tortillas fill with air, they’re ready!

Next, two smaller tortillas were fried on the stove until they ballooned with air, at which point García removed them from the heat, folded them in half, and packed them with a tangy mix of tender cactus and acidic tomatoes.

“Any type of taco, you need sauce! Otherwise it will be dry,” García warned before topping the dish with a spicy green tomatillo dressing, aromatic cilantro, and peppery radishes.

The limey, texturally layered tacos were paired perfectly with a generously portioned iced purple drink that García made by simply adding sugar to water boiled with hibiscus flowers. The sweet and floral beverage is “easier to make than lemonade,” according to the chef.

Mendita pats the arepa dough into a cake.

Finally, the classic Venezuelan veggie arepa did not disappoint.

García adds fried mozarella to the arepa.

The arepa was light and fluffy on the inside with a wonderfully salty and softly crunchy crust from the fryer. Sweet plantains met savory black beans, creamy avocado and tart tomatoes to form the ideal lunch, all topped with a salty slab of mozzarella that had been fried on both sides in the kitchen.

Packed up and taken back to a group of disillusioned working-from-home family members, the dishes maintained their right-off-the-grill integrity and brought some light and energy into the afternoon.

“I always like to do my best,” García reflected upon presenting the feast. It is the belief of this reporter that Rubamba’s best is also New Haven’s best— an emblem of excellence that should make the city proud.

Pandemic Pivots

Born in Oaxaca, Ernesto García and his family moved around Mexico throughout his childhood looking for “new opportunities and new adventures.” At the age of 16, García left Mexico to live with Gonzales, who had settled in New Haven a few years earlier.

Although he had studied for three years to be a carpenter, García found his first job as a dishwasher. Three months later, he was working as a line cook.

“I like to learn more, I like to move,” García told me when I visited the restaurant this week. Although he didn’t especially like to cook, he wanted “to continue to level up, to become better.”

“I started working because I had no choice, not because I liked it,” he stated. “But not liking it didn’t mean I was bad at it. I was doing well, so I focused on cooking and forgot about carpentry!”

In 2008, García got a job cooking at the Union League Cafe. He wanted to find part-time work during the midday for additional income, but couldn’t find a position with such particular hours.

Both he and his brother were professional cooks, so they joined together to start Ay! Arepa, a food truck business that allowed the two to sell arepas — a dish they had long loved and made — during lunch hour.

“Customers started asking, ‘Why don’t you have your own restaurant?’” García remembered. “They wanted a space where they could enjoy our food.”

So in 2012, Rubamba opened its first restaurant which, eight years later, is accompanied by a sibling location in Playa de Carmen, Mexico.

García’s dream is to keep expanding Rubamba and Ay! Arepa until they are available in every state. However, the pandemic has forced García to temporarily downsize instead.

“The pandemic started in a difficult time, and then it got worse,” García recalled. Food trucks lose business in the winter months, when patrons are less eager to wait outside in the cold for their lunch. Yale and other college students make up about 40 percent of Rubamba’s client base alone, but most left in March in the face of school closures. And, of course, there wasn’t a usual summer last year to make up for such losses.

As a result, García shut down the two empanada and taco trucks and converted Rubamba’s primary dining space into an additional kitchen area, where he and his team now focus on filling takeout and delivery orders. Because Rubamba features gourmet dishes that can get pricey (the food trucks offer less expensive versions of the restaurant’s meals), García also created a smaller, streamlined menu which highlights the eatery’s more affordable options over financially indulgent ones.

Despite some setbacks, García’s ongoing aim is to continue incorporating fresh ideas and ingredients into the menu to keep attracting new customers. In a time of mass stagnation, Rubamba prizes movement more than ever.

By April of 2021, all three food trucks will be back in business, and the empanada truck will showcase a gluten free option. García has also been planning new specials, such as cactus salad, stuffed squash flowers, and fried grasshoppers with salt, spicy sauce and lime. (“Grasshoppers are something you need to try at least once in your life,” he told me.)

García is also about to finish installing a vertical grill which will be used to make house-made tacos al pastor, or thin slices of deeply seasoned pork shoulder. Those should be available in early spring.

After a hard year, García was also reminded of a possible glimmer of hope while delivering meals to health care workers at New Haven Hospital. “They told me the vaccine should be available to the public by summer,” he smiled.

Despite the fact that Rubamba specializes in cuisine that is traditionally meat heavy, they have plenty of equally compelling and gratifying meals for the vegetarians among us.

Although I came for the vegetable arepa, I left with a vegetarian feast that was more than enough to share with my family of four. “You have to try the huitlacoche (corn mushroom) quesadilla!” García urged me. “And the cactus tacos!”

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