'Rapidito' brings dishes from Cartagena, Bogota to Chicago
CHICAGO -- Potatoes and hot dogs, topped with hard-boiled quail eggs, beneath a drizzle of pink sauce, containing a hybrid of ketchup and mayo. Is it late-night munchies? If you're Colombian, apparently so. Because Rapidito Colombian Gourmet Bites aspires to bring some of the typical dishes found in Cartagena and Bogota - like those salchipapas - to Chicago.
"It's street food Colombian. All of this stuff you will find in the little hot dog carts, this is how they serve it actually. You will step outside the nightclub at 2 a.m. and you will get a hot dog like this, said owner Carolina Diaz.
Flat corn discs, called arepas, are used as a base for pork, beef and even shrimp. They're all constructed similarly.
"We put cheese on it and then the shrimp one would be garlic shrimp, garlic with oil, and then we put it in the oven so it toasts a little bit, and when it comes out we put the crushed potato chips on it and then to make it look pretty we put the pink sauce again and avocado on the side," she said.
Cheese bread comes stuffed with guava or a caramel-coconut spread, while the weekend-only fruit salad is a sweet-salty mash-up: a half dozen fruits are cut into wedges, then drenched in sweet cream; crumbled queso fresco adds saltiness, but vanilla ice cream, candied figs and arequipe - a typical caramel - is added at the end.
"Here we have to work with what we have, but it's at least six, seven different fruits and basically that's how it goes with the cheese, so you want the salty to give it the contrast with the sweet sauce and the ice cream," said Diaz.
Just like a lot Mexican restaurants around town only serve things like pozole on the weekends, here at Rapidito the weekend-only items include this cheese bread - which has either the plain, or the guava or the arequipe - or, this crazy, weird fruit salad, which has about 15 different items, which I've never seen, and is unlike anything I've ever tasted.
The Colombian-style coffee is also worth checking out.
Rapidito Colombian Gourmet Bites
1855 W. Diversey Pkwy
(773) 857-3999
