Papelon Footscray Market restaurant review 2024

This market restaurant is giving Melbourne a unique taste of Venezuela, with larger than life serves, fat sandwiches and a sunny seafood soup you never knew you needed.

Papelon is the city’s newest, and possibly only, Venezuelan restaurant.

Melbourne deserves more Venezuelan restaurants.

Hang on, how many do we have exactly?

If you discount the arepa and empanada trucks, and other Latino cuisine love-ins, there appears to be only one.

Introducing Papelon, the sweet-like-sugar cane newcomer by home cook Reveka Hurtado.

You only need to walk by the sunny Footscray Market eatery to see how it’s winning locals and the Latin community over.

It’s packed to the eyeballs, with larger-than-life serves and even longer dinner tables where you can cram the whole fam.

Hurtado is a journalist by trade whoran a restaurant of the same name in Chile, before moving Down Under in 2020 without a whisper of English.

The larger than life patacon. Picture: David Caird

After years of grunt, she’s impressively found her voice in the local Latino circles and with the help of Colombian-born chef Edyson Araque (Littlefoot Bar and Kitchen), does Venezuela a solid with her first restaurant celebrating flavours from home.

So what can we expect?

Meat, and lots of it.

Shredded beef and chicken alongside a robust chorus of stomach-filling cheese, root veg and rice.

But I was also taken by the Caribbean influence, especially a rich tropical seafood soup made with coconut milk that conjures beachside holiday memories. More on this soon.

Papelon is a simple set-up: a sun-soaked window bench, 50 or so seater dining room filled with dark timber dining tables, warm yellow and orange walls and a roller door that rattles open to the bustle of Footscray Market.

Empty stomachs really stand no chance, especially if you’re trying a bit of everything.

Golden fried tequenos ($18 for five) or dough-wrapped halloumi squiggles may look, ahhh, questionable ... to certain imaginations.

A sweet papelon (sugar cane) syrup dunking balances the salty cheese to a tee.

Arepa Pabellon: lunch sorted. Picture: David Caird

Seafood soup cazuela de mariscos. Picture: David Caird

Traditional cassava ($12) or bolstering plantain ($18, starchy green banana) chips with all the trimmings may be your jam, though I’d warn against ordering too much. You can take leftovers home.

Arepas ($19), Venezuela’s sandwich answer, can be made in nine ways – either with slow cooked or minced beef or chicken, beans or chorizo.

That said, I wouldn’t sleep on the cazuela de mariscos ($32): a yolk-coloured coconut-milk soup with an ocean of seafood from the market, served traditionally with white rice.

Tender white fish, squid, baby octopus, prawns and pipis: all perfectly cooked, the silky broth an ode to the tropics with a fat wedge of avocado on top. Unlike anything I’ve tried before, God-tier produce shines brightly throughout.

Patacon ($38) isn’t for the fainthearted.

Visit Venezuela via the Footscray Market. Picture: David Caird

A mess of shredded chicken thigh, salsa, avocado and cheese between two fried plantains.

It’s nachos meets halal snack pack meets “bigger than your head” pub parma.

The monstrous meal, easily shared among three, is at once chewy, crunchy, tingling with heat, settled by avo and cheese.

Delicious.

On drinks, the creamy cocada ($12, coconut-milk drink) was inhaled in record time, while the namesake lemonade ($8) spiked with sugar cane syrup is deceptively not sweet.

Think cereal meets citrus.

There’s no booze, until the liquor licence lands, aside from in Hurtado’s flan drunk with a native Quesillo rum.

Fellow Venezuelan Maria Cuenca of Smilbite is responsible for the more-ish dulce de leche sandwich cookies; alfajores.

A fiesta of flavour and fun at every turn, this market-restaurant is something the suburbs must get excited about.

I’ll rephrase: Melbourne deserves more restaurants like Papelon.