How Colombia’s El Chato Redefined Latin America’s Fine Dining Map
Colombia’s restaurant El Chato, crowned Latin America’s Best Restaurant 2025, turns Bogotá’s biodiversity, migrant histories and neighborhood energy into fine dining theater, signaling a power shift across Latin America’s capitals, as first reported by Traveler from the awards in Guatemala.
From Bogotá Teenager to Global Kitchen Nomad
The road to El Chato’s coronation as the region’s top restaurant does not begin with a glittering ceremony in Antigua, Guatemala, but with a 17-year-old from Bogotá boarding a plane to Europe. Chef Álvaro Clavijo left his home city in search of old-world rigor at the Escuela de Hostelería Hofmann in Barcelona, joining a stream of Latin American cooks who, as food studies scholars writing in Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies have noted, looked to European kitchens to gain legitimacy before returning home to reinvent their own traditions.
From there, the path became a tour of gastronomic power centers. Clavijo began his professional career at Le Bristol Paris, one of those Parisian hotels where the dining room is almost a diplomatic stage. After a six-year stint in France, he crossed the Atlantic to New York City, cooking at Per Se, the rare restaurant that can make a tasting menu feel like both a rehearsal of discipline and a lesson in theater. Then it was back to Europe, this time to the radical minimalism of Noma, in Copenhagen, where the global conversation about “local” and “foraged” was being rewritten plate by plate.
The story could have continued eastward. Returning to Colombia to apply for a visa to Russia, Clavijo was turned down three times. The kind of bureaucratic wall that pushes many young professionals out of the region instead became a hinge in his life. Grounded in Bogotá, in 2017 he opened El Chato in Chapinero Alto, a neighborhood that urban researchers in the Journal of Latin American Geography have described as a microcosm of the city’s inequality and creativity: steep streets, dense apartment blocks, old houses turned into cafés and bars, money and hustle stacked together. Out of that mix, he built a restaurant that refuses to act like a palace.
Biodiversity, Memory and the Politics of a Tasting Menu
At first glance, El Chato presents as a contemporary bistro rather than a temple of haute cuisine. Family-style dishes move across crowded tables; the open kitchen on the first floor is close enough that you can read the cooks’ body language. Yet the menu reads like a quiet manifesto about what it means to cook in the world’s second-most biodiverse country, a statistic that has become shorthand in environmental science journals such as Conservation Biology and Biotropica, and which here arrives not as a talking point but as texture, flavor and risk.
The nine-course tasting menu leans hard into that biodiversity. There is tucupí, a wild manioc root extract long used in parts of the Amazon basin; jícama, the crunchy yam bean; and insects like mojojoy (palm weevil larva) and hormigas culonas (literally, “big-ass ants”), long eaten in regions of Colombia but rarely given this kind of stage. Greatest hits include heart of palm paired with rambutan, coconut and seaweed, and San Pedreño pork with watercress, cabbage and peas. Nothing about these combinations is nostalgic in the decorative sense. They are, instead, acts of translation, pulling ingredients associated with rural markets and forest trails into a setting that would not be out of place in Paris or New York, and insisting that they belong.
The drinks list follows the same logic of care and invention. The alcohol-free pairings stand out in a region where wine often arrives imported and expensive. A gulupa and ginger soda is tuned carefully against a dish of cubio tuber, corn and hay, conceived by bartender Andy Blanco Villamil. It is a small but telling detail in a country where many diners do not drink and where the pleasure of a night out cannot be reduced to a bottle of wine priced in foreign currency.
For travelers or locals without the time—or budget—for the full tasting, Clavijo has built a small ecosystem of options. At lunch, El Chato opens for à la carte service, letting diners drop in for a single plate and a glimpse of the energy. Across the street, his casual restaurant Selma (96), open daily for walk-ins, lowers the barrier even more, while his new Bar Ruda, opened this year, offers another entry point into the same culinary universe. In a city marked by stark income gaps, that layering matters. It turns a global accolade into something that touches more than the few who can book a multi-course feast weeks in advance.
On December 2, 2025, that universe received its loudest validation yet. At Santo Domingo del Cerro in Antigua, during a ceremony organized by The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, El Chato was named Best Restaurant in Latin America 2025. The Bogotá bistro had edged steadily upward, ranking third in 2024 and second in 2023, but this was different. It had been 13 years since a restaurant outside Peru or Argentina occupied the top spot, making Colombia’s win a symbolic break in a pattern that had yoked regional prestige to a narrow corridor of cities and kitchens along the Pacific and Río de la Plata.
Women, New Cities and A Redrawn Latin American Food Map
The story, however, is not only about one restaurant or one chef. Colombia’s presence on the list is suddenly dense. Cartagena’s Celele landed in fifth place, its Caribbean menu weaving together coastal ingredients and histories of migration. In Bogotá, the legendary Leo ranked 23, new entry Afluente came in at 34, Humo Negro at 41, and Oda at 76. Beyond the capital, Barranquilla’s Manuel (46) and Sambombí Bistró Local (98) in Medellín rounded out the country’s showing. Together, they sketch a map of a nation whose culinary identity is moving well beyond clichés of coffee and arepas.
Peru still loomed large. Lima’s Kjolle, from chef Pia Léon, took second place, marking the first time a restaurant led by a female chef has come so close to the top prize. Two other Peruvian establishments, Mérito (4) and Cosme (10), also secured spots in the top ten, underscoring Lima’s continued pull. But the gender balance of recognition is shifting. Three of the six individual chef awards went to women this year. From the Dominican Republic, Inés Páez Nin, widely known as Chef Tita, received the Champions of Change prize, the first time it has been awarded within Latin America. Her Fundación IMA NGO works with rural families and safeguards culinary techniques, reinforcing what scholars of food and development in journals like World Development have argued for years: that food systems are about livelihoods, land and culture as much as taste.
In São Paulo, Tássia Magalhães of Nelita was named Best Female Chef, recognized for championing talent in her women-only kitchens at Lita wine bar and Mag Market bakery. Her compatriot Bianca Mirilia of Evvai was honored as Best Pastry Chef. Kjolle added the Art of Hospitality award to its list of distinctions, while Bogotá’s Oda, led by Natalia Cocomá Hernández, received the Sustainable Restaurant Award for protecting regional biodiversity through its partnership with the Botanical Garden of Bogotá. In a region whose forests and rivers are threatened by mining, agribusiness and climate change, that kind of institutional collaboration reflects an understanding, echoed in environmental scholarship, that kitchens are now part of the frontline of conservation.
The host country, Guatemala, also seized its moment. All eyes turned to Ana (94) in Guatemala City, named One To Watch, where Colombian chef Nicolás Solanilla explores the ingredients of his adopted home. From the same city, Sublime ranked 19, new entry Diacá arrived at 37, and Mercado 24 at 42. For a Central American nation often overshadowed by its neighbors in tourism brochures, these placements suggest a culinary scene ready to draw visitors beyond ruins and volcanoes.
The rest of the top ten placed the continent’s diversity in a kind of edible conversation. While El Chato and Kjolle battled for first place, third position went to Parrilla Don Julio in Buenos Aires, an Argentine steakhouse that has become a global reference for grilled meat. Fourth went to Mérito, celebrated for merging flavors from Peru and Venezuela. Celele’s fifth place cemented the Caribbean as a serious player. Boragó in Santiago ranked sixth, and its chef Rodolfo Guzmán received the Icon Award for pioneering Chile’s contemporary gastronomy. Quintonil in Mexico City placed seventh, Tuju in São Paulo came eighth, Cosme in Lima was ninth and the list’s highest climber, jumping 19 positions, while Nuema in Quito anchored the top ten, its chef Alejandro Chamorro chosen by peers for the Chef’s Choice Award.
Further down the ranking, new entries sketch another layer of transformation. Arami in La Paz (48) and Demo Magnolia in Santiago (31), both opened in 2025, joined Crizia in Buenos Aires (40) among the debutants. Asian-inspired spots signal how Latin American cities increasingly look toward the Pacific: Shizen in Lima (62) for Nikkei cuisine, Umi (72) in Panama City as an izakaya, and Japanese restaurant Fukasawa (100) in Santiago. In total, 22 cities across the continent appear on the list, turning the ranking into something more than a guide for wealthy diners. It is, in practice, a travel map and a social X-ray, showing where capital flows, where young chefs return after years abroad, and where local ingredients are being reframed as national symbols.
For Colombia, the ascent of El Chato is both personal and collective. It is the story of a young cook whose blocked visa pushed him back into his own backyard, and of a country slowly realizing that its rivers, forests and markets contain not just raw materials for export, but the basis for a cuisine that can speak on equal terms with the world’s most celebrated kitchens. As Traveler’s reporting from Antigua makes clear, Latin America’s food map is no longer drawn only from Lima or Buenos Aires. From Chapinero Alto to Guatemala City, the region is cooking a different future—one tasting menu, one neighborhood, and one hard-earned award at a time.
Also Read: Latin America Bids a Bittersweet Farewell As Sabina Departs from Stages for Good
