JWM Magazine - Spring 2015

t Abasto, Chef Luz Beatriz Vélez’s restaurant in
Bogotá’s far-north Usaquén neighborhood, my
first plate — two tiny empanadas — really packs a
punch. By that, I mean more than flavor. When I
was last in Bogotá, nearly 20 years ago, I ate plenty
of empanadas and arepas and other platos tipicos,
but never anything as original as these delicately crisp, mole-
filled cornmeal crescents, served with spicy lulo aji. The lulo is a
gorgeous orange fruit with a tart pineapple flavor that grows like
a weed in Colombia’s hot lowlands. Two decades ago, Bogotá
chefs, who once looked to Europe and New York for inspiration
and ingredients, might have snubbed empanadas and lulos as
peasant food. Vélez — friendly, serious, with gray-streaked hair
and a smile befitting her name (“Luz” is Spanish for “light”) —
elevates both through artistry and experimentation.

The chef’s confidence shines through with each additional course: a pasta-like tangle of fresh, cool Putumayo palm hearts in olive oil, sea salt and pink peppercorns; a piping-hot caldoso (brothy rice) with shrimp, guajillo pepper and avocado, sprinkled with herbs and a squeeze of lime; and for dessert, a moist cake made with corn masa and milk-curd cheese and drizzled in red guava sauce. I wash everything down with the most delicious limeade, sweetened (and tinted brown) with shavings from a rustic block of cane sugar. Vélez, who opened Abasto in 2007

and the nearby Abasto Bodega in 2011, embraces Colombia’s
totality of cultural influences, but the Caribbean dominates her
food as well as her attitude (welcoming) and aesthetic (faded
blues and reds, bright open kitchen, dried herbs hanging from
rafters and baked goods piled atop countertops). She loves her
city’s overflowing food and flower markets, and works diligently
to promote organic farming, heirloom vegetable preservation and
culinary education.

“Thirty years ago, nobody taught cooking in Colombia. I had to go to France,” says Vélez. After studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and working for many years in Europe and Mexico, she returned home a decade ago. Today, she says, Bogotá is home to numerous cooking schools. She herself helped start one through a local nonprofit for youths displaced by guerilla warfare and poverty.

A NEW CHAP TER

Vélez is a among a new cadre of chefs leading a culinary revolution in a country that not long ago came close to actual revolution. After decades of guerilla warfare and drug-fueled violence, Colombia is getting its act together. Nowhere is the new optimism more pronounced than in Colombia’s capital Bogotá, home to nearly 8 million people. Bogotá’s annual homicide rate has dipped to a three-decade low, while the city’s GDP grows at a steady rate (in 2012, it was 4. 5 percent). In 2011, Fortune named Bogotá, with its spring-like climate and central location — about five hours by plane from New York, Mexico City and São Paulo — one of the world’s 15 “best new cities for business.”

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DELICIOUS Above: the lunch crowd at Black Bear, with its wraparound atrium. At right, clockwise from top left: Abasto chef Luz Beatriz Vélez; Cerdo en Chica at Ciervo Y Oso; food truck court in downtown; a meal at Grazia.