Andrés Carne de Res, an example of good gastronomic work in Bogotá
It was time for dinner. Under the stars of a warm Colombian night, we were about to enter a fantastic and personal universe made into a restaurant . Next door, a parking lot as big as an amusement park. I was prepared. At least half a dozen globetrotting friends, trusted diners, had told me that Andres Beef , a fun steak house About forty minutes (without traffic) from the center of Bogotá, it was unlike anywhere in the world, and they couldn't understand why this restaurant wasn't talked about all over the planet.
We enter through the front door. Two people wearing Mexican-style hats and ponchos handed each of us a huge glass of tequila with a piece of lemon floating . Another host led us to our table through a maze of flooded rooms. with scrap metal sculptures and second-hand kitchenware, including a giant crucifix made from bottle caps. The shelves on the walls were filled with religious images, masks and eccentric art objects . The ceiling, from which illuminated red hearts and other decorations hung, looked like a huge, vibrant mobile.
Manufacturing this glorious insanity took decades . Back in 1982, Andrés Jaramillo, a Colombian hippie with an old Fiat and a Jimi Hendrix fixation, decided it was time to stop wandering aimlessly around the country and start a business. He opened a roadside restaurant in Chía, about 30 kilometers from Bogotá: a grill with ten tables . Getting clients was more complicated. "I spent the day with a red napkin in the middle of the street, trying to get the attention of passers-by," recalls Jaramillo, who has already turned 57. "It was a very lonely job." But then he stopped being. All ten tables were filled, so he added more and more and more. And he still keeps adding.
Andres Beef
Nowadays, Andrés Carne de Res has capacity for two thousand diners, to which we must add another thousand more who dance, sing and drink between the tables. It's like a gigantic rave party that also takes place in downtown Bogotá, where, in 2009, Jaramillo opened a scaled-down version of Andrés Carne de Res called Andres D.C. ., and another one, Andrew's Square , a fantastic gastronomic patio built according to Jaramillo's instructions. Although nothing comparable with the original.
Spread over a space equivalent to four football fields, Andrés Carne de Res is a small town in itself . It has a children's area, with a playground, a dance studio and even a climbing wall for children, as well as workshops where much of the restaurant's furniture and crockery are made.
The staff is made up of about 700 people including cooks , waiters, disc jockeys, entertainers, a music band and the 'angels', who will take care of the car keys so you can drink all the tequila you want. At the end of the night, whether it is three, four or six in the morning, the 'angels' will take you back to Bogotá in your own vehicle.
We ordered a meat festival: sausages, lamb chops, salt sirloin... The food should take forever to arrive, given the acrobatic gymkhana that the waiters have to overcome to reach the tables among the tangle of diners. But amazingly they serve us without any delay . And it is not the mediocre food that one would expect in such a large and frenetic place, but it is of the highest quality: meat with a robust flavor and unusual juiciness. I am amazed and delighted by the restaurant's ability to pull this off, and overwhelmed by the city of Bogotá and its culinary scene, with its unexpected dynamism and unusual joy.
Andrés Carne de Res has a staff of about 700 people
During the last five years, while the economic crisis engulfs Europe and stalks the US, several Latin American countries draw attention to the opposite. Colombia has taken control of its hectic political scene and the potential of its natural resources. With free trade agreements in place, the country is seeing foreign investment and the height of its buildings increase. Cranes and construction sites, newly opened shops and businesses are seen throughout the Bogota metropolitan area, home to some nine million people... The international airport added a brand new terminal last year that continues to expand . And the small boutique hotels they are becoming part of important quality seals and prestigious hotel chains.
YES well much of Bogotá has to improve infrastructure , is much more impressive topographically speaking than anyone had warned me, surrounded by high peaks and mountains. The green mountain range traces the eastern limit of the center of Bogotá , just as the Santa Monica Mountains form the backbone of Los Angeles. Besides, the nicer neighborhoods on the western slope are affluent enough to make me think of Brentwood and Beverly Hills. One moves by them through a long artery that goes up, down and curves and from which its elegant apartments and residences, its lively restaurants and its well-kept gardens are surprising.
The interest of the great chefs in Colombia has just awakened and is due, in part, to the Bogota Wine & Food Festival , which celebrated its fourth edition at the end of August. Its objective is to attract the city to international gastrostars in order to show local restaurateurs the best of the world's cuisine, and vice versa.
Bogotá, the hectic city that does not stop growing
I continued my round visiting Laura Cannspeyer, whom she runs a local tea shop. That's where I headed on my first morning in the city. The taxi took me through the commercial area around my hotel, then up the hill to the posh neighborhoods. The store is located in Chapinero Alto and exemplifies the rapid gentrification process in this area . Laura has taken the ground floor of a dull limestone house on a residential street and transformed it into a charming retreat where she makes and sells her custom tea leaf blends imported from other countries, herbs, spices and flowers, most of them grown in Colombia. In fact, much of the English mint, lemongrass and lemongrass come from the pots in the store's backyard.
Laura pours me an aromatic tea flavored with cloves, nutmeg, and calendula. "I hope it has caffeine," she tells him, explaining that I feel exhausted. "It's because of the altitude," she tells me. Bogota, at 2,590 meters , is the third highest city in South America, after Quito and La Paz.
Laura Cahnspeyer's Teapot Alchemy Workshop
We go out for lunch together and on the way he points out all the restaurants that have sprung up in the area in the last year. There is Fame , which he opened with the help of a New York grill master and is specialized in American-style barbecues : smoked brisket, ribs, sweet corn on the cob... AND Fat , which also opened a little over a year ago and which guarantees its guests the experience of a typical Brooklyn meal . its owner, Daniel Castano , 35, decided together with his partner Camilo Giraldo to open a place to evoke this neighborhood simply because he lived there. Altogether he spent more than a decade in New York, working part of the time in Mario Batali's restaurants, before returning to Bogotá, suddenly converted into the land of opportunity.
I was excited to experience Brooklyn in Bogotá, but decided to wait until my friend John Magazino, who is in the business of importing goods from New York, joined me. Shortly after his arrival we launched into lunch at the Colombian Club , one of the most beloved gastro-sanctuaries of Bogotá, with dishes as traditional as pork rinds (fried pork rinds with a little meat and fat), the pipian empanadas (corn dumplings stuffed with potatoes with a peanut and ajiaco sauce) and other delicacies.
Carnivorous fantasy of Fame
Afterwards, John insisted on taking the car north about 30 minutes towards the historic center to walk around old Bogotá for a while, Candelaria , and thus lower all those milkshakes. Although not as central and poorer and more scruffy than other areas of the city that tourists prefer, La Candelaria has a special and magical look, with its labyrinth of narrow streets flanked by houses with red brick roofs.
Finally, we stopped at the main square, admiring the altarpiece of the neoclassical cathedral and other colonial-era buildings surrounded by green mountains. That seemed like a meeting between Europe and the Andes. Then we dive into the nearby Botero Museum , which houses a collection of around 200 paintings, drawings and sculptures from both Fernando Botero's private collection and his own work.
The labyrinthine old neighborhood of Bogotá, La Candelaria
That night, finally, we went to the restaurant Fat Brooklyn , and we found it full of very trendy young Colombians. Gordo Illustrates the Variety and Ingenuity of Bogotá's Growing Crop of Restaurants such as the Burger Market restaurant chain. We went to one of them another night, interested in the local raw material that it offers. Their expensive steaks and kosher beef burgers -according to Jewish beliefs- and a cross made by the university between the cow angus and wagyu beef are combined with a lettuce grown within the same restaurants, in the vertical gardens of the walls.
Kosher meat in delicious burgers
Now without John, I went to **Harry Sasson**, one of the most beautiful restaurants I've ever seen and which bears the name of his famous chef. In mid-2011, when fortune was already smiling on Bogotá, Sasson moved to this mansion built in the 1930s in zone T, in the neighborhood of El Nogal , where numerous diners come surprised by the fact that this "revolution" of the Bogota lifestyle has been such a well-kept secret.
One of the biggest promoters of this renewed image of the country is also one of television's most beloved food stars, Eleanor Espinosa , nicknamed Leo. She recently opened two restaurants, Leo Cocina y Cava, and La Leo Cocina Mestiza. The latter is located in the new and refined B.O.G. hotel, in the elegant El Lago neighborhood.
The menu is a mix of various influences that have shaped the country's cuisine ( the Arab, the African, the Caribbean and the European ) and it uses 100% local products. For example, La Leo's tahini is made with pigeon peas , a Colombian grain less aggressive than the starch of the chickpeas, and in addition, it is not accompanied with triangles of pita but with rice crackers that evoke arepas. The other new restaurant of his, Market , located in the bustling southwestern corner of Parque de la 93, invites you to live an ecological and green experience with Colombian ingredients.
Zone T, in the neighborhood of El Nogal
That night we headed to the historic center Usaquen , which, like La Candelaria, is one of those few neighborhoods in Bogotá whose architecture speaks of a colonial past. In the last five years Usaquén has become an amusement park for the growing number of Colombians with money that spend in restaurants and bars . In this constantly expanding area is located Bogota Beer Company, who makes his own beers.
It is also the natural habitat of three mega-swanky restaurants led by the prolific Leo Katz : Amarti, 7 16 and La Mar, Besides of Bistronomy, emblematic restaurant that belongs to the brothers Mark and Jorge Rausch, famous chefs in Colombia, and the only one capable of overshadowing Harry Sasson. Also in the neighborhood moves like a fish in water Takami group with three options: 80 Sillas, Horacio Barbato and Osaki.
One of the jewels of the Usaquén neighborhood
But we're dining at Supply , a pioneering place in Usaquén that took root just before the transformation of the area and which I have been told is the benchmark for the commitment of cuisine to the natural wealth of Colombia. The restaurant hosts a grocery store where to buy the national raw material that you use in your dishes. “This has been here all along,” says Luz Beatriz Vélez, the chef at Abasto. She is referring to the indigenous ingredients of her country that fill the store and which, she says, have been underestimated for too long. “We were not aware of what we had . We were not aware of our richness and diversity.”
Suddenly, Velez pulled me out of the restaurant and led me up a steep hill to show me The Supply Warehouse , which opened about two years ago in a warehouse. The Winery is specialized in Herb Roasted Country Chicken , and it's like a peasant market where you can buy organic vegetables, grains and aromatic plants, as well as fresh cheeses, breads and other products made on the spot.
Back in Abasto, John joined me. The dinner menu relied heavily on seafood from the Colombian coast, bathed by the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, accompanied by vegetables. From the table we could see how our dishes were prepared in the open kitchen. Later the chef appeared at our table to apologize because she had to leave. It was when she recommended us a restaurant: “Andrés Carne de Res. Have you heard of him?” . John and I looked at each other and smiled. "Oh yes, that's right, and I'm sure a lot of people are going to hear from him very soon."
This report has been published in the October magazine of Condé Nast Traveler.
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Abasto granadillas