Selma

The Restaurant

Selma opened in late 2023 in a restored early-twentieth-century Quinta Camacho house at Calle 65 #4-50 in Chapinero, a fifteen-minute drive north of Bogota's historic centre and at the heart of the city's most active dining-and-design district. The restaurant is the second project from chef-owner Alvaro Clavijo, whose original El Chato has been a fixture on the Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants list since 2018 (#2 in 2023, #33 in World's 50 Best) and has carried the Colombian fine-dining conversation onto the international stage. Selma was designed by Clavijo with Bogota architect Pablo Forero as a deliberate counterweight to El Chato's contemporary-Colombian seriousness: a comforting, social Mediterranean bistro where the food and the room invite slower, longer evenings.

The dining room runs about sixty seats across the ground floor of the restored house plus a small private patio at the back. The aesthetic is warm and intentional: original wood floors restored, hand-glazed Colombian ceramic tile across the open-kitchen pass, large arched windows along Calle 65, soft pendant lighting, and a long marble bar at the entrance where guest bartenders from across Latin America (Florencia in Buenos Aires, Carbon Negro in Lima, Apartamento 22 in Mexico City) are invited to run quarterly cocktail residencies. The kitchen project is a contemporary Mediterranean format that draws on Spanish, southern French, Greek and North African sources without doctrinal restriction: a focaccia programme baked-to-order in the open kitchen, a pasta section centred on hand-rolled gnocchi and a long-running tagliatelle with smoked-trout butter, salads structured around stracciatella and seasonal Colombian produce (mojito-cured cucumber, baby tomato confit, locally cured anchovies), and a crudo programme that handles smoked tiradito with mandarin and yellow-pepper curry alongside a sea-bass crudo with leche de tigre.

The wine list runs about one hundred and forty references with deliberate depth in southern French, Spanish (Rioja, Priorat, Galician albarino), Greek assyrtiko and a selected South-American sub-section (Mendoza malbec, Maipo cabernet, Itata Valley pais). The pricing structure - Selma deliberately sits below El Chato in cost - reads as part of the project's social design: Clavijo wanted a room where the city's senior dining community could gather without the formality of a tasting-menu evening, and the menu's per-person spend in the COP 180,000-320,000 range (before pairings) lands precisely there. The room books two to three weeks ahead for prime weekend service and is generally available within a week midweek.