Kelly Vargas opened her first restaurant in 2025, and she’s already a chef the local dining scene has started keeping an eye on. Curuba Colombian Kitchen, the mom-and-pop she runs with her husband Leo in Allen’s Lost Creek Village, is small enough that the attention reads less like industry buzz and more like word actually getting around a neighborhood one plate at a time, exactly the sort of chef CraveDFW likes to flag before everyone else catches on.
Both Vargas are Bogotá natives who spent years in hospitality before opening their own place, most recently at the Omni Hotel. Kelly trained at Gato Dumas culinary school in Colombia before that, and the restaurant, tucked into a former mochi doughnut shop at 1546 Stacy Rd., is named for curuba, a South American fruit also known as banana passionfruit, a detail that signals this menu isn’t chasing a general Latin American audience so much as representing one specific country as precisely as it can.
The food leans traditional with a health-conscious streak underneath it. Arepas, the corn patties that anchor most Colombian menus, come filled with cheese or shredded meat, and the empanadas run a real range of fillings, chicken, brisket, shrimp, ground beef, or a vegan option, three to an order. Fried green plantains come with a choice of Spanish creole sauce or a creamy mushroom sauce, and the bandeja paisa, the hearty combination platter of meats, beans, and rice that takes its name from Colombia’s Paisa region, is the dish to order for anyone who wants the full spread in one plate.
Every ingredient is sourced without GMOs or MSG, the proteins run nitrate-free, and roughly 80 percent of the menu, arepas and fried breading included, is gluten-free without announcing itself as a gluten-free restaurant first.
The drink menu follows the same instinct toward specificity. Alongside standard cocktails, Curuba pours drinks built on aguardiente, Colombia’s anise-forward national liquor, sweetened with panela, unrefined raw sugarcane sugar, instead of simple syrup.
Dessert comes from an in-house bakery producing tres leches and cinco leches cakes, passion fruit mousse, rice pudding, and milhoja, a layered puff pastry, alongside almojábana and its gluten-free cousin pandebono, both traditional Colombian cheese breads.
Vargas has talked about the goal being introduction rather than translation, keeping the recipes traditional while finding a way to bring them to a wider audience without losing what makes them Colombian in the first place. This early into the restaurant’s life, that balance already looks like it’s landing the way she intended, and it’s exactly why Curuba earns a spot on CraveDFW’s own list of the chefs worth watching this year.
