In 2025, El Chato claimed the top position in Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants — an accolade that surprised precisely nobody who had eaten there. What Álvaro Clavijo has built in a converted Chapinero Alto house is deceptively simple on the surface: an 80-seat room with bare brick walls, 1970s rotary telephones, faded high-school portraits on the walls, and stacks of old medical encyclopedias. The décor reads as artful clutter. The cooking reads as one of the most focused culinary visions in the western hemisphere.
Clavijo trained at Barcelona's Hofmann School and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris before working at Noma in Copenhagen and Per Se in New York — a CV that would justify pretension. He returned to Colombia and opened El Chato in 2017 as a bistro. What he resisted was the urge to perform. Every plate on his constantly evolving menu responds to what is growing, arriving, or maturing in Colombia's extraordinary agricultural landscape. Sabana de Bogotá farmers, Pacific coast fishermen, and Amazon basin foragers supply a kitchen that treats provenance not as marketing language but as the only logical starting point.
The menu changes with the seasons — sometimes weekly. Expect preparations that range from deceptively straightforward (a ceviche that achieves a acidity impossible to explain) to quietly radical (a slow-cooked meat dish that tastes like it has been perfected across generations, though Clavijo invented it last Thursday). Portions are generous for tasting-menu standards; the à la carte is equally compelling. The wine list is intelligent without being intimidating — natural wines from Colombia and neighbouring countries sit alongside well-chosen European selections.
Service is warm and informal in the best Bogota tradition — knowledgeable but never stiff. The room fills by 8pm and the energy builds steadily. A reservation for El Chato is the single best thing you can do for your understanding of what Colombian cooking has become.
