On a chilly Sunday evening in Carrboro, David Moncada turned on the stove and prepared to open for business.
Moncada and his wife Patricia Fidhel are the owners of Na’wara de Arepa, a new food truck off of Merritt Mill Road. Na’wara opened in December 2018 and serves arepas, a traditional Venezuelan dish made out of maize. In Venezuelan culture, arepas are typically sliced in the middle and filled with shredded meat, cheese or vegetables.
Moncada and Fidhel, who were both attorneys in Venezuela, opened the food truck to fill what they saw as a gap in the Chapel Hill restaurant scene.
“I would like for people to know a piece of Venezuela,” Moncada said. “This is something traditional.”
The couple’s son, Leonardo, 14, and daughter, Alexandra, 12, typically work at the food truck on weekends. They both attend Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. Fidhel said owning a family business is unique because everyone is working together toward a common goal.
The truck’s name is a tribute to a colloquial term commonly heard in Venezuela to express astonishment. Na’wara appeals to local Venezuelans who look for a taste of home, such as Chapel Hill resident Jessica Fenjves.
“I left Caracas when I was 18,” Fenjves said while referring to her hometown, Venezuela’s capital city. She has lived in the U.S. for 11 years.
Her story is similar to that of the four million Venezuelans who have fled their country since 1999, when socialist leader Hugo Chavez took the presidential office.
Venezuela, formerly one of the richest nations per capita due to its oil reserves, now faces shortages of food, medicine and other basic needs. The International Monetary Fund predicted an inflation rate of 10 million percent for 2019, which comes after two decades of economic mismanagement.
