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Chapinero Alto, the locus of Bogotá’s food scene, could just about pass for London’s Hampstead—aside from the 2,600 meters of altitude, the yellow trumpet bushes and the emerald surrounds of the Andes. The broad avenues of this smart district are lined with mid-20th-century red-brick mansions designed by French-Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona, who reimagined Eurocentric modernism for a post-independence Colombia. Today, one such building is occupied by another national pioneer: Eduardo Martínez, one of the founding fathers of a burgeoning Colombian food movement that increasingly rivals Peru in the 50 Best lists of restaurants and bars.
Back in 2001, when the capital city was defined by mediocre European offerings, Martínez opened Mini-Mal, which is dedicated to social change by using Indigenous rites, and flora and fauna from one of the planet’s most biodiverse countries. One thousand varieties of fruit, from mangosteen to soursop, grow across Colombia’s more than 300 ecosystems, which span the Amazon, Caribbean, and Pacific, and are home to 65 Indigenous languages. Yet the nation had been a stranger to itself, cleaved by three Andean ranges and more than 50 years of political and drug-related violence that only officially ended in 2016, when a peace deal was reached with the last faction, FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia).
Mini-Mal was an extension of former agronomist Martínez’s research into alternative uses of plants and animals, acknowledging the rights of Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast. Descendants of West African slaves, they and Indigenous peoples had no land rights before the 1991 constitution. “They were guardians of all this biodiversity and Indigenous produce but they had no idea of the treasures they possessed. Moreover, they had no customers,” says Martínez. Growing coca leaves for cocaine producers was often a good option for farmers. “During the narcoterrorism of the ’90s, there was a huge exodus of chefs from Colombia. The restaurant was a platform to empower suppliers economically and help them take pride in their identities.”
At first, “rolos”—the Bogotános—were perplexed by Mini-Mal’s ingredients, from mollusks harvested in Pacific mangroves to umami-packed tucupí, fermented from cassava by women in the Amazon. “Before, pasta was the luxury,” says Martínez’s wife and partner, Antonuela Ariza. “Now it’s tucupí.”
A nearby mansion is the new home of Salvo Patria—Save the Homeland—the seasonal, waste-conscious restaurant of Juan Manuel Ortiz and Alejandro Gutiérrez Vélez. Originally a café, it was founded in 2011 by Ortiz, who previously worked in Melbourne as a barista. “I was told that Colombian coffee was the best in the world, but at home we were only drinking Nescafé,” or coffee that was “too low quality to sell”, he tells me. Traditionally, Colombians made “sock coffee”, filtered through a cloth and sweetened with sugar cane juice. Ortiz changed that with V60 drippers and quality domestic beans from small producers—a matter of national pride for the world’s largest exporter of washed Arabica beans. Gutiérrez Vélez, who grew up close to the coffee-growing Antioquia region and had worked at Virgilio Martínez’s Central in Lima, headed the kitchen at the Salvo Patria restaurant.
“I grew up with the violence of the 1980s and 1990s so I was ashamed of being Colombian. We only had Shakira to be proud of,” says Gutiérrez Vélez, standing before jars of experimental fermentations with Amazonian macambo shells and lulo fruit. “It was a conscious thing to build our identity, our culinary multiculturalism, our biodiversity. Food can help keep people out of poverty and fight the violence that arises from it.” On his menus are Pacific tuna with chontaduro, the heart-shaped fruit of peach palms; and chargrilled cubios, ancient tubers from the northern Andes, on a mash of corn husk, sourced from a women’s cooperative in Montes de María, a former conflict zone in the Caribbean.
Another Bogotá resident changing narratives is sommelier Laura Hernández Espinosa, the daughter of pioneering chef Leonor Espinosa. Leonor was named the world’s best female chef in 2022 for the “ciclo-bioma” tasting menus at her Chapinero restaurant Leo, which involve ingredients such as mojojoy rainforest worms, Andean cacay nuts, and pulantana, a decaffeinated coffee alternative from the Guajira desert. Laura headed her mother’s Funleo foundation, working with producers across the country. In 2021 she launched Territorio, a range of seven distillates that use native ingredients such as passion flowers and coca leaves. It’s her way of disrupting the state’s monopoly on such drinks, which “suffocated artisanal production”, she says from her La Sala de Laura bistro above her mother’s restaurant. She is also inspired by the country’s women who are “protecting their traditions and families”.
