The Pringles Man, at one point, seemed to possess definitively human facial features, before gradually being reduced to an ovoid, anthropomorphic egg creature with the tousled hair and moustache of a 19th century barkeep. Reducing its logo to a cipher, the brand’s design budget instead seems to have been directed toward the rest of the packaging, finding perhaps its most brilliant conceit yet in the concept of a single hooked Pringle, hanging alongside two rosy Serrano hams. These Spanish delicacies, while not on par with the world-class jamón iberico (treated so luxuriously that I recently spotted one outfitted with its own sun-deflecting jacket) still rest safely on the level of classy foods not easily approximated by potato chips. I didn’t taste these Pringles, which were purchased as a souvenir, and thus can’t vouch for their likeness to charcuterie, but they serve as yet another indicator of the slightly off-kilter world of foreign snack foods, where everything is at once familiar and totally alien.
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I knew something was amiss when I arrived in Cartagena, the hour nearing midnight, the temperature still in the high nineties. Our hotel was located on the long strip of Avenida San Martin in the Bocagrande resort zone, and I was reasonably confident I could pick up a quick takeout dinner after landing without much fuss. The nearby picado place, however, didn’t do takeout, the hotel restaurant was a casino bar called ‘Masters,’ and the area was otherwise populated by uninspiring fast food options, from El Corral to Burger King to Kokoriko, Still, stubborn despite the late hour and the ridiculous humidity, I was determined not to waste this precious foreign meal on a ordinary burger. I ended up drenched in sweat at around one a.m., having ranged much further down the strip than necessary to land on a tiny Venezuelan takeout spot, where I purchased some mediocre arepas. I was bowed but not defeated.
I’m still not sure the reason, and whether this was just an exceptional period of hellish heat or some climate-changed enhanced nightmare scenario (it was winter, after all), but Cartagena is the hottest place I’ve ever been. Luckily daytime hours afforded many more convenient options, and the next day I was able to scuttle from one shadow to another to La Olla Cartegenera, an old-fashioned restaurant with an impressive, rainforest-themed backroom. Like many spots on the Bocagrande, La Olla seemed to have a Middle Eastern slant to the menu. Middle Eastern immigrants have a long history in Colombia, responsible for contributing dishes like quibbe (which pops up here and across the rest of the Caribbean, often denoted as ‘quipes,’) but I’m not sure why all these places were clustered in this one neighborhood, otherwise dominated by pale white resort towers and pizza places. Whatever the case, I skipped the falafel for a seafood sampler, hoping to get a quick overview of the local offerings. As see above, this included rock lobster, prawns in garlic sauce, some nicely marinated grilled fish and a smattering of shrimp. Visiting a foreign city always involves some measure of culinary comparison, weighing the things it has in common with home versus the differences, which may be as subtle as slight variations in coffee preparation or as extensive as rib soup for breakfast. A massive cosmopolitan center, the largest city in Colombia and the third largest in South America (behind São Paulo and Lima), Bogotá shares a lot of surface commonalities with New York. Yet the primary difference is that, for all intents and
purposes, New York is done growing. It’s already received its waves of immigrants, both domestic and foreign, and while it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, its position and shape are now relatively fixed. Bogotá, on the other hand, has a much more open-ended set of prospects. Still in the midst of successive waves of a population boom, it’s gained nearly two million new residents in the years following the 2005 census, more than quadrupling in size since the mid ’70s. To accommodate all these people, it continues to expand outward, absorbing formerly outlying communities, the city’s character changing with each new acquisition. It’s also, as I learned trying to traverse the popular Santa Fe neighborhood, packed to the gills with young people, many of them still teenagers, which seems to ensure a continuation of the population spike. A city of this scale promises a full battery of international options, fine dining experiences and stylish nightspots, all of which Bogotá has in spades. I wasn’t really interested in any of this. What I was after was a rough picture of Colombia’s capital city as a prism for its national cuisine, refractions and reinterpretations of dishes from Nariño to Boyacá. Most of this gets supplied by the migrants flooding into the city, adding to the local Santafereño style fare with new flavors. It was a bit difficult demarcating one sub-cuisine from another, but I found that many places, especially in the city’s more working-class neighborhoods, tended to focus on the open-air cooking of the Llanos, a vast grassland in the Northeastern part of the country, which produces a sort of rustic grill culture that’s popular all over. I also spotted numerous references to the nearby Tolima, Cauca, Valle del Cauca and Santander departments. One thing all of these styles share is a fondness for meat, beef in particular reigning supreme over the rest. Colombia, with its outlandish bounty of ridiculously fresh, not-quite-ready-for the Northern Hemisphere crops, is a paradise for the fruit lover. In fact, it’s a paradise for anyone interested in plunging into a miniature universe of colorful, edible, beautiful little objects, which grant further brightness to an already vibrant landscape. The country produces a wide variety of different fruits across its several micro-climes, the majority of which find their way to Bogotá, the country’s capital and its near-geographic center. Much of this harvest is on display at Plaza de Mercado de Paloquemao, a truly spectacular temple of produce, where hundreds of vendors congregate inside an airplane hangar-sized space. The focus is mainly botanical, although Paloquemao is actually an all-purpose market, offering fish and meat and various home goods. It's also surrounded by nested conglomerations of other satellite markets, which all seem to boast boundless quantities of goods at rock-bottom prices.
On my 5th day in Colombia I found myself in a white and teal painted restaurant in Cartagena’s Old City, grateful to finally be out of the sun. The temperature was at this point topping out around a 116 heat index, twenty of those degrees coming solely from the miserable, momentum-crushing humidity. Having sweated out at least a few water bottles worth of moisture, I was soaked, scorched, and about to collapse from fatigue. This meant I was also less than enthused when the waitress brought out the complimentary Sopa de Pescado, its herb-flecked liquid steaming in a small bowl.
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