ANCESTRAL SPIRIT

Across Colombia, a new generation is reclaiming its rich food herit

- Stephanie Rafanelli

Chapinero Alto, the locus of Bogotá's food scene, could just about pass for London's Hampstead—aside from the 8,660 feet of altitude and the emerald surrounds of the Andes. The broad avenues of this smart district are lined with mid-20th-century red-brick mansions designed by French Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona, who reimagined Eurocentric modernism for a post-independence Colombia. Today, one such building is occupied by Eduardo Martínez, one of the founding fathers of a Colombian food movement that increasingly rivals Peru in bothering the 50 Best lists of restaurants and bars.

Back in 2001, when the capital city was defined by mediocre European offerings, Martínez opened Mini-Mal, which is dedicated to social change by using Indigenous rites, flora, and fauna from one of the planet's most biodiverse countries.

One thousand varieties of fruit, from mangosteen to soursop, grow across Colombia's more than 300 ecosystems, which span the Amazon, Caribbean, and Pacific, and are home to 65 Indigenous languages. Yet the nation had been a stranger to itself, cleaved by three Andean ranges and over 50 years of political and drug-related violence that only officially ended in 2016, when a peace deal was reached with the last faction, FARC.

Mini-Mal was an extension of former agronomist Martínez's research into alternative uses of plants and animals, acknowledging the rights of Afro-Colombian communities on the Pacific coast. Descendents of West African slaves, they and Indigenous peoples had no land rights before the 1991 constitution.