Cumbia opens at Central Market with menu of Colombian food
COLOMBIAN-themed cafe Cumbia has opened in the Market and promises to introduce diners to dishes they have not experienced – including breakfast soup “changua”.
IT’S a busy time in the lives of the owners of Cumbia Bar and Kitchen, which opened last Friday on the Grote St side of the Adelaide Central Market.
As well as preparing for the launch of their Colombian-themed cafe, Salvatore Pittelli and Julietha Burgos Canon are raising another baby, four-month-old
son, Leonardo.
Julietha promises Cumbia will introduce diners to dishes they have not experienced.
These include the breakfast soup “changua”, with poached eggs in a vegetable and milk broth, as well as the slow-roasted rolled pork and rice
dish “lechona”.
“We want to represent Latin America and let people know that the food from there is more than Mexican,” says Julietha. “There is fantastic cuisine throughout South America and it is different from country to country.”
Julietha moved to Adelaide from Colombia, where her family runs a food production company, to be with Salvatore, who started the Veloce Paninoteca group.
Cumbia’s interior design, by Cox Architecture, includes eye-catching green paintwork, decorative tiles and some of the original brickwork, including a feature arch to the market stalls.
While there is space for only 20 seats inside, more tables will be available at the front and side when the weather is good, as well as a cart selling takeaway street food to market shoppers.
Cumbia will be open when the market is trading, for breakfast, lunch and later on a Friday night. Whatever the time, many of the dishes will include the light, corn-based flatbread known as “arepa” – which is good news for people seeking to avoid gluten.
“It’s a good healthy style of bread, very soft and gentle,” Julietha says.
Julietha also recommends the “changua”, which comes from a region of Colombia near the Andes mountains, where she grew up.
“We lived at an altitude where it is colder so we used to have for breakfast something warm,” she says. “The changua has a fantastic flavour of milk, stock, shallots, garlic and coriander, with two poached eggs, accompanied by arepa.
“It is not heavy – it warms you up in the morning but it is very light.”
Chef Luis Carlos Gomez has come from Colombia to help set up the kitchen at Cumbia for the first four weeks, then hand over to Tha Sivatha Ngok.
Cumbia, Shop GR43, Adelaide Central Market, city, 0404 131 418, cumbia.com.au