Owner of Yxi’s Arepas now serving Venezuelan comfort food in Ithaca

Yxi Ojeda (pronounced like “pixie” without the “p”) will never forget the day her friend Agustin Vivanco, owner of Zocalo Mexican Bar and Grill, posed a question that changed her life. She was feeling depressed at the time.

“He said, ‘I have a check here for $10,000. What should we do with this?” Ojeda said. Having worked shoulder to shoulder for years in Ithaca’s restaurants, they went into business together on a new venture: a food truck combining both their cuisines. And that’s how Yxi’s Arepas & Gordito came to be located at 301 Taughannock Blvd. in Ithaca, where it is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The food truck opened three weeks ago, about the same time as neighboring fellow women-owned business Feel Goods, which is located right next door at 317 Taughannock Blvd. The clothing store and maker space specializes in an array of ethically made products from small businesses and makers.

Described on its Facebook site as “Venezuelan comfort street food,” Yxi’s Arepas takes the traditional food Ojeda loved growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, and fuses it with Vivanco’s Mexican family recipes.

The Venezuelan-style arepas are made with cornmeal. “They are crispy on the outside and doughy—hot and soft—inside,” Ojeda said on a recent morning, sitting at one of the food truck’s picnic tables overlooking the inlet.

She has a tattoo on her wrist of the view from the home in the mountains where she grew up and said it reminds her of watching all the buildings below light up one by one in the early morning light and the smell of people cooking arepas wafting out the windows.

She hopes her food reflects that cozy feeling. “It’s homey,” she said of her cuisine. “It’s humble. It’s healthy. It is comfort food. You feel safe. You have it, and feel that everything is better.”

And, because Ojeda uses corn flour in all of her recipes, they are also naturally gluten free.

The food truck’s menu includes Agustin’s Arepa, which is Vivanco’s special recipe, plus Monterrey cheese Guasacaca (avocado salsa), and adobo sauces. There is also a veggie offering, a kids’ arepa, and the Reina Pepiada, Ojeda’s mother’s recipe for chicken salad, which includes avocado, cilantro, red onion and mayo.

For sides, Yxi’s offers fried sweet plantains and Grandma’s black beans. Try the plantains dipped in the beans, Ojeda suggested, saying it “takes it to another level.”

Her cuisine is approachable and deceptively simple. The beans, for instance, take three hours of constant stirring to turn out just the way Ojeda’s grandmother made them. “I’ve been a foodie since I was a kid,” she said.

It has been a long, winding road from her childhood in Venezuela to her life now in Ithaca. From the age of six, Ojeda attended school to become a viola player. As a young teenager, she traveled with a children’s orchestra, performing all over the world. “It was a lot of fun,” she said. It was also a lot of eating at hotel buffets, which she loved.

At 16 she changed course and focused on getting her bachelor’s degree in journalism. Then she worked in museums for five years, and after that taught viola. Eventually she became the sectionalist of an orchestra. “Everything was going great in my career, escalating and escalating, and then Venezuela was destroyed in 2014,” she said. Wanting to leave the country, she had a connection to Ithaca through her sister, who works at Cornell University. She took a five-month English program through BOCES, after which she moved back to Venezuela for a year, then returned to Ithaca again. “I already made friends. I love Ithaca. I love the lake, the nature,” she said. “This felt like home.”

In 2015 she began working in restaurants throughout Ithaca, meeting Kevin Sullivan, owner of several local eateries including Luna and Purity Ice Cream.  

“This guy was amazing,” Ojeda said of Sullivan. “He opened up his doors of all his restaurants to me.”

She met her husband, Russ Friedell, while working at Luna in Collegetown.

They had a small wedding in January 2020, and Ojeda said she felt the pieces of her life starting to come together. “Everything has opened up and started flourishing since that day, and we have been building this life together,” she said, adding that Friedell comes to the food truck in the evenings to help her wash dishes.

The food truck itself was also love at first sight, according to Ojeda. Formerly owned by Waffle Frolic but only used by them a handful of times during the pandemic, it had everything Ojeda needed, including an open back and multiple windows, which she said makes it feel much less claustrophobic than it might otherwise.

“I just love it so much,” she said. Business has slowly picked up since she opened. “Every day we get a few more, then a few more.”