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.
One thing I did learn about local meat is that, as with constellations, the cuts down here in the Southern Hemisphere aren't the same, with butchery following a different tradition of decomposition than that of the U.S. In some sense, the relative cuts are similar, while their eventual uses, and thus sizes and preparations, are unusual. This fun article about Mexican butchery provides some comparable insight. In terms of beef, the primary Colombian difference lies in the fact that zebus (aka Brahmas), members of the hardy Bos Indicus family (as opposed to our familiar Bos Taurus) are the cattle of choice. The zebu is better suited to the arid climate of the region, and also offers a bonus cut: the hump, commonly referred to as morillo. I tasted this delicacy at La Fama, a trendy restaurant that aspires to a certain level of imported Brooklyn sheen, prizing that connection over any association with the food’s rural American origins. I can see why making links to another country’s humble peasant cuisine would be uninteresting for Bogotáns, who already have their share of modest meat preparations, and in La Fama’s case the Brooklyn bona fides are at least logically sourced. Before opening in 2012, the place hired the guys from Williamsburg’s The Meat Hook to serve as consultants, and while this butcher shop/general store hybrid doesn’t serve barbecue, it makes sense that they’d want someone with combined meat and hipster credentials to give the Brooklyn stamp of approval.
The monstrous tamal - concealing both an entire chicken drumstick and a hefty slab of pork belly, not to mention rice and yellow pigeon peas – was already a meal in itself. This variation hails from nearby Tolima, as opposed to the competing local version (you'd think a two hundred-year-old restaurant would be the best place to find local cuisine). As far as I can tell, the primary difference between the two is the inclusion of rice in the Tolimense version. I can’t say definitively, however, since I never got a chance to eat the Santa Fe variant, nor any of the other exotic variants mentioned in the recipe above. One day, I have to imagine, I shall return and complete the survey.