Pantano, a suburban bar and restaurant that brings Latin flair to Willagee

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It feels like there’s a group on Facebook for everything and anything. Even in little old Perth. Want to buy records locally? There’s a group for that. How about trade gardening tips with like-minded green thumbs? You’re in luck. Feel like going deep into a westside sausage roll wormhole? The 18.3k members of Perth Sausage Roll Hunters are standing by.

Hobbies and interests aside, communities dedicated to specific ethnic and migrant groups seem to be the another major use for Facebook Groups, especially for newer migrant groups that don’t have established community hubs and clubs like Western Australia’s Italian, Greek or Chinese communities do.

One such Facebook Group is Comunidad de Colombianos en Perth, a virtual agua cooler for the city’s burgeoning Colombian population. Among the regular topics of conservation are posts from homesick Colombianos asking for restaurants where they can taste the flavours of the motherland. According to an informant buddy who is a member of the (private) group, the answer to most of these pleas is Pantano.

On Instagram, this neighbourhood hangout introduces itself a Latin bar and restaurant. I must admit, when I first drove past Pantano, I mistakenly assumed it was just another neighbourhood pasta or pizza joint serving the good people of Willagee. (While pantano might sound Italian, it’s Spanish for “swamp” and is a reference to the wetlands that contained the precious wilgee – Nyoongar for “red ochre” – that the suburb is named after.)

In my defence, it was early morning and the shop’s white shutters were down. Had I driven past while the shutters were up, I would have spied a predominantly black interior with flags of South American nations and colourful cut-outs hanging from the ceiling. A poppy, botanically themed mural painted by Melville artist Jesus Ziegler enlivens the room’s longest wall. If it was after sunset, the twinkling fairy lights in the backyard would likely have caught my eye, as would equally bright neon signs in the window announcing “open” and, crucially, “bar tropical”.

I don’t think it’d be unfair to describe Pantano as a Latin pub.

Perhaps you’ll road-test the refajo ($12; a shandy starring the Irn-Bru taste-alike Colombiana Kola topped with beer). Perhaps the sweet, viscous and boozy Venezuelan eggnog ponche crema ($16) is calling your name. Or maybe you’d like a bottle of rum to call your own (whole bottles from $240; shots from $12) and to dip in and out of over multiple visits? One reason for this strong drinks focus, according to Venezuelan owner Juan Paolo Leon Salmon, is practical. Alcohol sales help keep venues open. The other is personal.

Salmon and his family live in Willagee and, till Pantano’s opening in 2021, the suburb was sans neighbourhood bar. During those you-know-what lockdowns, he stumbled on a hairdresser that was, weirdly, formerly a restaurant. The current tenants had left the kitchen rangehood intact which Salmon took as a sign to take over and, with a little help from his friends, turn the salon back into a food and drink space. Finally! Willagee had a local bar, and Salmon had somewhere to cook the food he grew up with.

Although Salmon is from Venezuela, his country shares many food ways with that of neighbouring Colombia. And he, like me, has little interest in starting or joining any Colombian-Venezuelan food beef about who invented what, especially when it comes to the arepa, the region’s famous gluten-free maize flatbread. Instead of arguments over ownership, Salmon is more interested in discussing the arepa’s varying roles in both nation’s diets.

In Colombia, the arepa is often deployed as a side to use for dipping and mopping. In Venezuela, however, it’s a vehicle for fillings to travel from chef to customer.

Salmon clearly knows arepas: a byproduct, I suspect, of having a father who made arepas in Ecuador where Salmon was born. And like his dad, Salmon also makes his own arepas using areperina (a pre-cooked white corn meal similar to polenta). But instead of grilling his arepas as is commonplace, our man serves his deep-fried. It’s how his grandma did them and, to paraphrase Sole, the most enjoyable way for first-timers to lose their arepa virginity.

The Pantano menu opens with burgers that you can get either in squishy seeded white buns or cradled between – you guessed it – a crisp fried arepa split into two discs. American-style cheeseburgers ($19; great) or house made chorizo patty burgs with the lot ($27) sandwiched between golden pucks of fried corn aren’t traditional: it’s just one way Salmon is trying to spread the arepa (and broadly Latin American) bible. The change-up isn’t bad – that extra crunch factor was welcome – but the arepa “buns” tended to slide with each bite, even when held in place with brown paper.

I’d suggest getting your RDI of vitamin arepa the traditional Venezuelan way by putting a small slit into the side of your flatbread, opening it up like a Pac-Man, then filling it like a pita pocket. As to what to put in there, that’s on you. The core menu features 20 different Latin American-ish fillings broken down by category (beef, chicken, pork, vegetarian and vegan – a category, Salmon tells me, is popular with customers) that you can get served myriad ways including in a burger bun; on a bed of fries or salad, plus teamed up with the menu’s various fried bits and pieces. (More on those later.)

For first-timers, this ordering model can be confusing. Thankfully, our kind, outgoing waitress patiently explained the concept to our table. While it might take certain diners (ahem) some time to get their heads around this pick-and-mix menu, the fast-moving kitchen had no such problems. Our order arrived tableside fast and in less time than what it had taken our waitress to talk things through.

So onto the food. We elected to go full Venezuelan with our filled arepa and got it bulked out with reina pepiada ($22), the country’s popular chicken and avocado mix. I’m yet to get to Venezuela so can’t speak to what the OG should taste like, but this version would have benefited greatly from a spark of lime or acidity. Still, that was really the only damp squib from our meal.

The pantano ($24) featured the same chorizo patty from the aforementioned arepa burger, only chopped and sprinkled with crunchy potato chips and salsas. This porky, joyous mass arrived on a bed of sliced casava chips ($14 as an individual side) that were starchy, comforting and filling like all deep-fried tubers ought to be. Tequenos ($24 for six) are a popular Venezuelan snack of breaded cheese sticks that are, again, deep-fried and served with a guava cream cheese that called to mind a sweet-salty fruit caramel. Unexpected but effective.

The single best thing we ate, though, were the deep-fried plantains (patacon con hogao y queso; $14): four golden rafts of unripe, flattened bananas anointed with a rich, well-reduced tomato and onion sauce, then showered with a mix of feta and mozzarella for flavour and stretch. Tres leches cake ($15; a nicely balanced three-milk cake topped with whipped cream and cinnamon) and the rest of the dessert options stick to proven Latin favourites. If only the at-times disinterested staff could be as sweet.

The food at Pantano won’t change your life, nor is it supposed to. (When was the last time a chicken parmy at the pub made you question your life choices?) This is fun, calorific and tasty cooking that will be instantly comforting to many and take them back home, even if just for an hour.

Interestingly, two people had recommended Pantano to me lately. One was someone I met on a camping trip (incidentally also the same trip I was introduced to ramen soyannaise) who loved that Pantano was doing its own thing with arepa burgers. The other is a Willagee resident that loved having Pantano as his local rather than some cookie-cutter chain pub. Neither were Colombian, Venezuelan or, indeed South American which, in many ways, speaks to the value and importance of the Pantanos and other neighbourhood bars of Perth.

At a time when more of life seems to be migrating from real life to online – we have business meetings online, we date online, we stream movies we once went to the cinema for – neighbourhood places where people congregate and mingle feel more essential than ever. Sure, Facebook Groups and Insta stories are fun and convenient, but hangouts and building teams in the flesh is the real double-tap.