Alvaro Clavijo, chef of El Chato, the best restaurant in Latin America according to the Top 50 rankings, is usually seen in a distinctive look: hat, shirt and black pants, which he uses to move between fine dining and casual addresses.
With this view, he visited restaurants in the capital, Rio de Janeiro, during last year’s edition of the 50 Best Restaurants. He particularly liked a bar on the ground floor of an apartment building, on the border between Copacabana and Ipanema, surrounded by a paint shop.
It’s Tejolada, a bar opened by chef Thomas Trosgros that serves cheesecake, jello, ground beef with okra, and grilled chicken on Dog TV every day. “I won’t be able to keep up the pace I do for the rest of my life,” he says. “When I retire, my dream is to open a place like this.”
Offering more affordable food is the proposal on the first floor of El Chato, located in El Chapinero, a residential neighborhood outside Bogota’s trendier center. The lower part of the restaurant is dedicated to serving the a la carte menu, with dishes ranging from US$6 to US$40 ($31 to R$213). The hall is mostly occupied by local customers.
“I didn’t want to make Colombian food that Colombians would only try once and never come back to,” he says.
The upper room is where the tasting menu is served, which consists of 12 courses and costs around US$186 (R$994). There, customers are mostly tourists.
Either way, the idea of Clavijo is to serve food that reflects Colombian ingredients and traditions, and is prepared in a way that makes the result on the plate easy to understand.
Examples of what have already been served include coca leaves with colona ant (similar to sauvá) and coconut, or crab with jicama (a type of local kale) and sea grapes, a vegetable ingredient similar to fish roe.
“I find it interesting that we, Latin American chefs, don’t use foie gras or truffles. In Colombia, we make more and more efforts to source local ingredients. We don’t need to look abroad, we have our own uniqueness here,” he says.
But El Chato didn’t exactly have that proposition when it opened in 2017. He decided to open the restaurant after being rejected for a visa to work in Russia several times. The chef was preparing to be part of the chef team at a restaurant opened by Frenchman Pierre Garnier in Moscow.
Clavijo gained overseas experience after studying gastronomy in Spain and later worked at Restaurant Joel Robuchon (1945-2018) in Paris and at Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. After refusing to work in Moscow, he decided to open his own place in Bogotá.
From that time on, Clavijo kept chicken hearts with potatoes, representing the meat and vegetable input available in the rivers and mountains surrounding Bogotá.
“But then we started traveling around Colombia and saw that there were amazing ingredients here. A lot of it we hadn’t been able to access for years because of drug trafficking. We couldn’t access other areas locally.”
For him, the country suffers to this day from being associated with events such as those of the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar (1949-1993).
“When I was growing up, I heard bombs and people getting killed. But since the 2000s everything has changed a lot. Now it’s very safe, but they keep repeating the same stories. But when (tourists) come here, they love it.”
For chefs, Colombia is getting more international attention now because it is relatively cheap and welcoming to tourists.
Unlike Mexico and Peru, the country has some difficulties emerging on the gastronomic scene because it does not have a very typical dish or recipe, such as tacos or ceviche, says the chef. But he sees Colombia as one of the continent’s emerging gastronomic powers – just like Brazil.
“Latin America’s 50 Best celebrations were already held in Colombia, Peru and Mexico. At that time, Brazilian chefs were a small gang that only spoke Portuguese. We didn’t interact with them much. After last year (with the awards ceremony in Rio), that changed. This is great,” he says.
Chateau Restaurant
Calle 65 #4 -76, Bogota, El Chapinero, Colombia. @elchato_rest
The journalist traveled at the invitation of the Rio de Janeiro City Council