The one place that every single person told me to check out while in Bogota was this crazy experiential dinner place called Andres Carnes Des Res - which is in Chia, a 45 minute drive outside of Bogota. Unfortunately, Allison and I didn't really have time to check it out, but luckily we randomly stumbled upon this super fun and adorable "food court" (for lack of a better word) in the Hacienda Santa Barbara mall which was across the street from our hotel and which I later found out by the same people as Andres Carnes. We were originally only using the mall as a short cut to get to our hotel and found this gem. It's amazing and is the kind of place that I absolutely eat up. I'll be honest and say that I'm not sure how authentic it is since it is a food court in a mall, but everything there was South American cuisine (so no Panda Express, Pizza or food like that), all the menus were in Spanish and there were tons of locals eating there. There are a bunch of different food "stalls" with food ranging from ceviches, arepas, empanadas and juice bars. I was totally overwhelmed by the options and by the fact that I couldn't really understand any of the menus except for a few select words.
Allison wanted to get a plantain dish and despite every effort to try to translate it and even going as far as showing them an actual plantain, she did finally get to order a dish that had plantain in it.
What we didn't expect was that it would look like this - a giant fried plantain with cheese and a sweet sauce poured on top of it. I had a bite of it and it was good and quite unique - it's was a bit heavy and starchy (obviously since it's a giant plantain!) but if you like plantains, you'll be in heaven.
Meanwhile, I saw the word arepa it was followed by "de choclo" which I had no idea what that meant) on one of the food stall menus and in my limited experience with South American food, I knew that I loved apreas here in NYC, so why not try it in Colombia? So apparently the kind that I like are the Venezuelan kind because those are the white and fluffy "buns" and then stuffed with savory fillings like chicken, pork and guacamole. The Colombian kind is more like a sweeter, thicker crepe version and apparently "de choclo" just means it's stuffed with lots and lots of gooey cheese. It was tasty but it was on the heavy and dense side and I could only finish about half of the dish ($4.50 USD).
Luckily, I also got a classic ceviche dish ($6.50) from another food stall to offset all that heaviness. Despite being much cheaper and from a food court, it was actually quite delicious and just as good as the one served at La Mar last night. It had lots of giant cuts of tilapia and plenty of red onion and lime juice.
There was tons of other food options that looked amazing and interesting but I just didn't have the stomach capacity to try it all. But it was a fun place and knowing that it's by the same guy as Andres De Res, I'm definitely bummed that I missed out on that other experience but thankful that I got to experience something of his.
No comments:
Post a Comment