colombian food picture post
I haven't been taking many photos of food since getting to Latin America, because to be honest the food is neither very attractive nor very good. To some degree this is my own fault. I have a rule when traveling that i should only eat at restaurants that are accessible to the average person who lives in the place i am visiting. Which is to say, i never eat at gourmet restaurants when traveling, and i rarely go to restaurants that local people might save for a birthday or date night. If the place doesn't serve an affordable lunch for local workers, then i will not go. I don't want to feel like i am an agent of gentrification, or creating a tourist price bubble. So the food you're seeing here is literally the food that regular local people eat for lunch every day.
You might notice from the opening picture that this looks very similar to the first meal i ate in Panama City as well. Turns out that's because the first restaurant i went to in Panama City was a Colombian restaurant. This is the standard lunch over here. Standard price 10000 pesos, or around $3. Sometimes you get them as low as 6000 pesos. A few places charge over 10000 pesos, but only in very touristy areas. It's never over 20000.
What do you get? Rice, beans, meat, salad, plantain. It's actually a fairly balanced meal, although ideally i'd prefer more vegetables and less meat. You also always get a soup to start. Sometimes you get to choose fish or bone broth. The broth always has a ton of tubers in it, like pumpkin, yuca, yam or potato. Usually there is corn in it too, and cilantro. It's not very picturesque so i don't have any pictures, but just imagine a thick greenish soup with veges and bones inside it. Yes, they serve you the bones in the bowl. Sometimes (one day a week) you get tripe in there, which is supposedly a great bonus feature, but it tastes like chewy cardboard. Also, most places give you an ice cold drink too, which is always some kind of homemade lemonade or fruit mix.
The opening picture is a main dish of one of the standard lunches. It features lentils for the bean component and a special type of pulled beef that is common on the Caribbean coast called carne desmechada. One of the best things about carne desmechada (aside from the fact there is no bone in it) is that it's cooked up with spices and vegetables, so it's slightly more flavorful than the usual "slab of meat" preparation.
A thing that's different here to Panama is that the salad is usually a real salad made with raw vegetables. At many restaurants in Panama you will disappointingly be given pasta salad, potato salad or coleslaw. So, basically, just fucking mayonnaise. Is it even really salad at that point?
The next picture is a fish version of the standard lunch. I got that one in Cabo de la Vela, where the only available option was fish. You can ask for it prepared how you like, but the standard way is fried. They just gut the fish, but they don't filet it, and then they deep-fry it. This is very popular in Panama too. No beans in Cabo de la Vela, but they still had some carrot and tomato.
This is another spin on the standard lunch with carne desmechada. The beans are red beans here, the "plantain" component is yuca, and the rice is coconut rice. If you're thinking "why is that coconut rice brown?" - me too. It's because in Colombia they add some panela (a sort of raw brown sugar) or (apparently) Coca-Cola to the mix. It's stickier and sweeter than regular white rice. I think white rice tastes better, but i usually order this when i have the option because presumably it has more calories, and i'd like to get more bang for my buck when i am cycling.
Here is different lunch. This isn't a standard lunch, this is from a roadside stand that sold various meats and chicken rice. I think it's something similar to a paella, made with saffron and stock and a vanishingly small amount of vegetables and chicken scraps. Again, i prefer white rice, but the places that sell chicken rice only sell chicken rice - there is no other option.
Lest you think i only ever eat carne desmechada, here is an example of a pechuga asada (BBQ grilled chicken breast) standard lunch. If it looks like a lot of meat, it isn't - the yellow layer underneath the chicken is patacones (double-fried discs of plantain). I think that's the best part of these standard lunches, they don't overdo the meat portion. If you go to a "fancy" restaurant and order a steak, you're going to get a steak as big as the plate, which i find grotesque, but these smaller helpings make it easier for me to deal with eating meat ~5 meals a week.
To be honest, probably my most-ordered standard lunch is lomo asado (grilled pork loin), but for some reason i don't have any good pictures of that. Usually the meat choices are beef steak, carne meschada, pork loin, pork chop, fish, chicken breast or chicken leg. The preparation options for the "slab of meat" options are deep-fried, sautéed or grilled on a BBQ (depending on what setup the restaurant has). You will also often get "guisado" option for the chicken, which i had hoped meant pulled and stewed, but usually it just means baked in the oven - bone-in - with some sauce on it. In parts of the desert i think they also served goat, but i didn't order it because the first half-dozen times i heard them list it off i just thought it was the name for some fish.
Time to switch things up a bit. Street food! Most of the "restaurants" i eat at could perhaps be called street food as well, since many of them just feature some plastic chairs and tables outside next to a BBQ, but the next couple things are treats that you'll find from vendors who might only have one or two chairs - at most - and no tables.
The vast majority of the street food here is variations on "deep-fried starch filled with protein". Usually the starch is pastry and the protein is meat. There are lots of different empanada-like things, some made with yuca, some made with corn, some made with wheat. The best one of these is the arepa de huevo. It's about an inch-thick corn tortilla which is sliced open and then an egg cracked inside, then the whole shebang is deep-fried. The thing about these deep-fried things is that they don't look very interesting. They're just a yellow blob. So here is a different street food. Chorizo.
In the evenings you will often see people with a BBQ grilling chorizo on the street. They grill the sausages and then serve them in little paper plates on top of hand-cut chunks of masa dough. You often get the choice of hot sauce, lime juice or garlic sauce for the top. And, yo, they are fucking delicious. I don't often say that about meat, but these Colombian chorizos are pretty bomb. The strongest spice in there that i taste is cumin, but there is probably some paprika too. I think the reason i like them is because all the other food in Colombia is so bland, it's nice to get something that actually has some spiciness baked in - it doesn't just come from the hot sauce you pour on top.
Here is the vegan's best friend version of Colombian street food. Occasionally you will see people grilling up plantains on the BBQ. Usually they split them and fill them with queso fresco, but you can ask for just the plantain if you want. This one obviously has the cheese. Cooking it on the BBQ gives it a delicious crispy and caramelized outside, meanwhile the inside is soft, sweet and starchy. It's so good. Even better if you add homemade hot sauce (pictured). The other bottle you can catch a glimpse of here is Pony Malta, the most common malt beverage in Colombia. I adore it, it's the best cold drink you can buy from the fridge in regular shops. It's not too sweet, it foams up with a creamy Guinness-like head, and it's packed with added B vitamins too. Excellent thirst-quencher. But more on those in a bit.
Just in case people reading this don't know what an arepa is, the next picture is an arepa. This is a different preparation to the arepa de huevo, which is deep-fried. This is a grilled one. It's the same inch-thick little corn tortilla that they slice open and fill with something, but it tastes more like a toasted sandwich than a croquette. Sometimes they grill it on a flat grill (as shown below), but the best ones are when they have a BBQ and they do the initial heating of the arepa inside a banana leaf, then take it out of the leaf to grill over the flames, giving it a blackened outside. So good. What are the fillings? Almost always just cheese. Occasionally ham and cheese. It's a toasted sandwich. Pictured with Aguila, my favorite Colombian beer.
Now, let's get on to objectively the best part of Colombian cuisine. The fucking drinks. Given the food only contains miserly amounts of vegetables, dining here would leave you feeling sadly bloated, if it weren't for the ubiquitous juice bars.
The following picture is from a roadside juice bar that also sold deep-fried street food. I tried to get a bit more in frame to get an idea of what that means. You can see little bottles of sauce that people squirt or spoon onto their empanada or arepa or carimañola or papa rellena as they are eating. It's a common sight that people will order something, get it in a serviette, take a bite (to make a hole), squirt some sauce, take another bite, chat to the vendor, squirt some sauce, and so on, then drop the serviette on the table or the street and walk off. Yes, the roadsides are completely and utterly covered in trash here. It's a culture shock when you first arrive, but now i am used to it.
Anyway, the drink is a fruit juice made of "lulo". At these juice bars, you can pick your fruit, whatever they have in the fruit bowl that day. I'd never heard of lulo before, so i ordered it. Zapote is another fruit i've never heard of before which is very common here. Corozo too. Lulo tastes a little bit tart, sort of kumquat-y? Not sure. They blend your fruit together with sugar, water, ice and (unless you explicitly ask them not to) condensed milk. You can walk off with the drink in a take-out cup, but if you stay and chat and drink it there, sometimes they'll pour some more in at no extra cost.
I'm not entirely sure if this next thing counts as a drink or a fruit salad, but i think in Colombia they're basically considered the same thing. This is a very large helping of "tutti frutti", which is something you will find sold all over the place by people with large plastic or glass vats of stuff that looks like fruit punch. It's a fruit salad with bananas, pineapples, mangos, strawberries, apples and other stuff in there, but it's all floating in a liquid that i think is watermelon juice. It might be a mix of watermelon with some berries... One popular local berry for juice is mora berry, which is a bit like a tart blackberry that blends up thick and creamy. That white swirl on the top is condensed milk, i think. Note that the whole thing is ice cold thanks to the large chunks of ice floating in the vat that they ladle it out of.
Here is one of my favorite drinks from China that made an appearance here in Colombia too - cane juice! It's freshly squeezed from the sugar cane stalk, right in front of you. But because it's Colombia, they don't shy away from putting ice in it. Cold, sweet, green and refreshing.
In another entry for the "juice or salad" debate, this is a michelada. Get the Mexican concept of a michelada beer cocktail out of your brain right now, because in Colombia it's a fruit salad in a salt-rimmed glass. This has green and orange salt, which are both flavored with different citrus flavors. Inside the drink is a bunch of julienne green mango and cubes of ripe/yellow manago. I'm not sure if the juice is orange juice or mango juice, but it's acidic and sweet. Note the seasoning with salt and pepper on the top. If you buy mango or some other fruits ready-to-eat on the street here, they'll usually salt and pepper it. This is less fun than the chili powder of Mexico or the five spice powder of China, but it's about a million times better than the flop-ass NO SEASONING WHATSOEVER that they put in US, Canada, UK, Germany etc. Please season your fruit. It tastes great.
And here we are, the holy fucking grail of "i just had food poisoning so i can't drink anything acidic oh my god i need to throw up i have cramps what the fuck can i eat". Folks, i present to you: watermelon juice. But because it's Colombia, it also has cubes of watermelon in it. When you see one of these guys on the side of the road it's like a light opens up from heaven and angels descend playing trumpets because it is the best fucking thing. It's cold. It's sweet. It's incredibly mild and easy on the stomach. I mean, it's basically water. But made out of fruit. Even if you didn't just have food poisoning, cycling all day through 38C/100F heat and finding a watermelon guy on the side of the road, lordy it's the best. I am going to miss watermelon guys so much when i'm out of melon country.
Now, for my last picture of all, i am going to show a bit of the ethnic cuisine you can get in Colombia. Note that there are very few ethnic restaurants here - especially outside of the large cities. There are pizza places and burger places and fried chicken places, but those are practically global cuisines. What you will find reasonably often is a Chinese restaurant.
Chinese restaurants in Colombia specialize in "Chinese rice". Of which "Valencia rice" is apparently a sub-category, and "Valencia rice" is - as far as i can tell - just fried rice with saffron in it. ("Chinese rice" is of course fried rice with soy sauce in it.) Occasionally you will find "Chinese spaghetti", which looks about as unappealing as it sounds like, but it's similar to chow mein. And then there is chop suey. Which is the only one of these dishes that has a vegetable in it. With meat. Of course. Because it's almost completely impossible to find any food in Colombia that doesn't have meat in it. This picture is chop suey with "Chinese rice" as a side. The veges are onion, celery, bell pepper, broccoli and carrot - vegetables that are rarely used in Chinese food in China - but even trash vegetables are better than no vegetables.
So, looking at that picture, you might think "well amw, why don't you just order chop suey everywhere?" Yeah. You'd think, right? Well it's because most Chinese restaurants here literally only have "Chinese rice" on the menu, and the only choice you get is which meats, and if you want fried chicken (!?), french fries (?!) or lumpias as a side. But of the ones that do have chop suey on the menu, the one where i took the above picture is literally the only one that actually had it in stock. That's right. You can ask them "hey can you make me something with vegetables" and they will reply "oh, sorry, we don't have any vegetables, we only have meat". At a fucking Chinese restaurant. Head asplode.
Since i have spent a lot of this post favorably comparing Colombia to Panama, let's close it off with an example of the kind of food you could get at a Chinese restaurant in Panama.
OMG 叉燒包 pork bun! OMG 腸粉 cheung fen! OMG 芥蘭 gai lan! I miss youuuu 😭
So there's a taster of food in Colombia. It's not very spicy. There is a lot of meat. Almost everything that doesn't have meat has dairy. Eating out and trying to remain vegan is extremely difficult, and would leave you eating pretty much only the sides, or relegated to Hare Krishna restaurants and overpriced hipster joints in the major cities. But the fruit juices are very good. And at least on the Caribbean coast it was standard to have hot sauce on all the tables, including a pico de gallo sort of homemade salsa at the more hardcore Costeño joints. Alas i am now heading south, and i anticipate that means the food will get blander. We'll see. I successfully made it through the midwest, so i am battle-hardened at this point. Onward!
Well, onward, after this goddamn food poisoning damaged stomach stops cramping up the moment it gets something more difficult than a banana inside it.
But, onward!
You might notice from the opening picture that this looks very similar to the first meal i ate in Panama City as well. Turns out that's because the first restaurant i went to in Panama City was a Colombian restaurant. This is the standard lunch over here. Standard price 10000 pesos, or around $3. Sometimes you get them as low as 6000 pesos. A few places charge over 10000 pesos, but only in very touristy areas. It's never over 20000.
What do you get? Rice, beans, meat, salad, plantain. It's actually a fairly balanced meal, although ideally i'd prefer more vegetables and less meat. You also always get a soup to start. Sometimes you get to choose fish or bone broth. The broth always has a ton of tubers in it, like pumpkin, yuca, yam or potato. Usually there is corn in it too, and cilantro. It's not very picturesque so i don't have any pictures, but just imagine a thick greenish soup with veges and bones inside it. Yes, they serve you the bones in the bowl. Sometimes (one day a week) you get tripe in there, which is supposedly a great bonus feature, but it tastes like chewy cardboard. Also, most places give you an ice cold drink too, which is always some kind of homemade lemonade or fruit mix.
The opening picture is a main dish of one of the standard lunches. It features lentils for the bean component and a special type of pulled beef that is common on the Caribbean coast called carne desmechada. One of the best things about carne desmechada (aside from the fact there is no bone in it) is that it's cooked up with spices and vegetables, so it's slightly more flavorful than the usual "slab of meat" preparation.
A thing that's different here to Panama is that the salad is usually a real salad made with raw vegetables. At many restaurants in Panama you will disappointingly be given pasta salad, potato salad or coleslaw. So, basically, just fucking mayonnaise. Is it even really salad at that point?
The next picture is a fish version of the standard lunch. I got that one in Cabo de la Vela, where the only available option was fish. You can ask for it prepared how you like, but the standard way is fried. They just gut the fish, but they don't filet it, and then they deep-fry it. This is very popular in Panama too. No beans in Cabo de la Vela, but they still had some carrot and tomato.
This is another spin on the standard lunch with carne desmechada. The beans are red beans here, the "plantain" component is yuca, and the rice is coconut rice. If you're thinking "why is that coconut rice brown?" - me too. It's because in Colombia they add some panela (a sort of raw brown sugar) or (apparently) Coca-Cola to the mix. It's stickier and sweeter than regular white rice. I think white rice tastes better, but i usually order this when i have the option because presumably it has more calories, and i'd like to get more bang for my buck when i am cycling.
Here is different lunch. This isn't a standard lunch, this is from a roadside stand that sold various meats and chicken rice. I think it's something similar to a paella, made with saffron and stock and a vanishingly small amount of vegetables and chicken scraps. Again, i prefer white rice, but the places that sell chicken rice only sell chicken rice - there is no other option.
Lest you think i only ever eat carne desmechada, here is an example of a pechuga asada (BBQ grilled chicken breast) standard lunch. If it looks like a lot of meat, it isn't - the yellow layer underneath the chicken is patacones (double-fried discs of plantain). I think that's the best part of these standard lunches, they don't overdo the meat portion. If you go to a "fancy" restaurant and order a steak, you're going to get a steak as big as the plate, which i find grotesque, but these smaller helpings make it easier for me to deal with eating meat ~5 meals a week.
To be honest, probably my most-ordered standard lunch is lomo asado (grilled pork loin), but for some reason i don't have any good pictures of that. Usually the meat choices are beef steak, carne meschada, pork loin, pork chop, fish, chicken breast or chicken leg. The preparation options for the "slab of meat" options are deep-fried, sautéed or grilled on a BBQ (depending on what setup the restaurant has). You will also often get "guisado" option for the chicken, which i had hoped meant pulled and stewed, but usually it just means baked in the oven - bone-in - with some sauce on it. In parts of the desert i think they also served goat, but i didn't order it because the first half-dozen times i heard them list it off i just thought it was the name for some fish.
Time to switch things up a bit. Street food! Most of the "restaurants" i eat at could perhaps be called street food as well, since many of them just feature some plastic chairs and tables outside next to a BBQ, but the next couple things are treats that you'll find from vendors who might only have one or two chairs - at most - and no tables.
The vast majority of the street food here is variations on "deep-fried starch filled with protein". Usually the starch is pastry and the protein is meat. There are lots of different empanada-like things, some made with yuca, some made with corn, some made with wheat. The best one of these is the arepa de huevo. It's about an inch-thick corn tortilla which is sliced open and then an egg cracked inside, then the whole shebang is deep-fried. The thing about these deep-fried things is that they don't look very interesting. They're just a yellow blob. So here is a different street food. Chorizo.
In the evenings you will often see people with a BBQ grilling chorizo on the street. They grill the sausages and then serve them in little paper plates on top of hand-cut chunks of masa dough. You often get the choice of hot sauce, lime juice or garlic sauce for the top. And, yo, they are fucking delicious. I don't often say that about meat, but these Colombian chorizos are pretty bomb. The strongest spice in there that i taste is cumin, but there is probably some paprika too. I think the reason i like them is because all the other food in Colombia is so bland, it's nice to get something that actually has some spiciness baked in - it doesn't just come from the hot sauce you pour on top.
Here is the vegan's best friend version of Colombian street food. Occasionally you will see people grilling up plantains on the BBQ. Usually they split them and fill them with queso fresco, but you can ask for just the plantain if you want. This one obviously has the cheese. Cooking it on the BBQ gives it a delicious crispy and caramelized outside, meanwhile the inside is soft, sweet and starchy. It's so good. Even better if you add homemade hot sauce (pictured). The other bottle you can catch a glimpse of here is Pony Malta, the most common malt beverage in Colombia. I adore it, it's the best cold drink you can buy from the fridge in regular shops. It's not too sweet, it foams up with a creamy Guinness-like head, and it's packed with added B vitamins too. Excellent thirst-quencher. But more on those in a bit.
Just in case people reading this don't know what an arepa is, the next picture is an arepa. This is a different preparation to the arepa de huevo, which is deep-fried. This is a grilled one. It's the same inch-thick little corn tortilla that they slice open and fill with something, but it tastes more like a toasted sandwich than a croquette. Sometimes they grill it on a flat grill (as shown below), but the best ones are when they have a BBQ and they do the initial heating of the arepa inside a banana leaf, then take it out of the leaf to grill over the flames, giving it a blackened outside. So good. What are the fillings? Almost always just cheese. Occasionally ham and cheese. It's a toasted sandwich. Pictured with Aguila, my favorite Colombian beer.
Now, let's get on to objectively the best part of Colombian cuisine. The fucking drinks. Given the food only contains miserly amounts of vegetables, dining here would leave you feeling sadly bloated, if it weren't for the ubiquitous juice bars.
The following picture is from a roadside juice bar that also sold deep-fried street food. I tried to get a bit more in frame to get an idea of what that means. You can see little bottles of sauce that people squirt or spoon onto their empanada or arepa or carimañola or papa rellena as they are eating. It's a common sight that people will order something, get it in a serviette, take a bite (to make a hole), squirt some sauce, take another bite, chat to the vendor, squirt some sauce, and so on, then drop the serviette on the table or the street and walk off. Yes, the roadsides are completely and utterly covered in trash here. It's a culture shock when you first arrive, but now i am used to it.
Anyway, the drink is a fruit juice made of "lulo". At these juice bars, you can pick your fruit, whatever they have in the fruit bowl that day. I'd never heard of lulo before, so i ordered it. Zapote is another fruit i've never heard of before which is very common here. Corozo too. Lulo tastes a little bit tart, sort of kumquat-y? Not sure. They blend your fruit together with sugar, water, ice and (unless you explicitly ask them not to) condensed milk. You can walk off with the drink in a take-out cup, but if you stay and chat and drink it there, sometimes they'll pour some more in at no extra cost.
I'm not entirely sure if this next thing counts as a drink or a fruit salad, but i think in Colombia they're basically considered the same thing. This is a very large helping of "tutti frutti", which is something you will find sold all over the place by people with large plastic or glass vats of stuff that looks like fruit punch. It's a fruit salad with bananas, pineapples, mangos, strawberries, apples and other stuff in there, but it's all floating in a liquid that i think is watermelon juice. It might be a mix of watermelon with some berries... One popular local berry for juice is mora berry, which is a bit like a tart blackberry that blends up thick and creamy. That white swirl on the top is condensed milk, i think. Note that the whole thing is ice cold thanks to the large chunks of ice floating in the vat that they ladle it out of.
Here is one of my favorite drinks from China that made an appearance here in Colombia too - cane juice! It's freshly squeezed from the sugar cane stalk, right in front of you. But because it's Colombia, they don't shy away from putting ice in it. Cold, sweet, green and refreshing.
In another entry for the "juice or salad" debate, this is a michelada. Get the Mexican concept of a michelada beer cocktail out of your brain right now, because in Colombia it's a fruit salad in a salt-rimmed glass. This has green and orange salt, which are both flavored with different citrus flavors. Inside the drink is a bunch of julienne green mango and cubes of ripe/yellow manago. I'm not sure if the juice is orange juice or mango juice, but it's acidic and sweet. Note the seasoning with salt and pepper on the top. If you buy mango or some other fruits ready-to-eat on the street here, they'll usually salt and pepper it. This is less fun than the chili powder of Mexico or the five spice powder of China, but it's about a million times better than the flop-ass NO SEASONING WHATSOEVER that they put in US, Canada, UK, Germany etc. Please season your fruit. It tastes great.
And here we are, the holy fucking grail of "i just had food poisoning so i can't drink anything acidic oh my god i need to throw up i have cramps what the fuck can i eat". Folks, i present to you: watermelon juice. But because it's Colombia, it also has cubes of watermelon in it. When you see one of these guys on the side of the road it's like a light opens up from heaven and angels descend playing trumpets because it is the best fucking thing. It's cold. It's sweet. It's incredibly mild and easy on the stomach. I mean, it's basically water. But made out of fruit. Even if you didn't just have food poisoning, cycling all day through 38C/100F heat and finding a watermelon guy on the side of the road, lordy it's the best. I am going to miss watermelon guys so much when i'm out of melon country.
Now, for my last picture of all, i am going to show a bit of the ethnic cuisine you can get in Colombia. Note that there are very few ethnic restaurants here - especially outside of the large cities. There are pizza places and burger places and fried chicken places, but those are practically global cuisines. What you will find reasonably often is a Chinese restaurant.
Chinese restaurants in Colombia specialize in "Chinese rice". Of which "Valencia rice" is apparently a sub-category, and "Valencia rice" is - as far as i can tell - just fried rice with saffron in it. ("Chinese rice" is of course fried rice with soy sauce in it.) Occasionally you will find "Chinese spaghetti", which looks about as unappealing as it sounds like, but it's similar to chow mein. And then there is chop suey. Which is the only one of these dishes that has a vegetable in it. With meat. Of course. Because it's almost completely impossible to find any food in Colombia that doesn't have meat in it. This picture is chop suey with "Chinese rice" as a side. The veges are onion, celery, bell pepper, broccoli and carrot - vegetables that are rarely used in Chinese food in China - but even trash vegetables are better than no vegetables.
So, looking at that picture, you might think "well amw, why don't you just order chop suey everywhere?" Yeah. You'd think, right? Well it's because most Chinese restaurants here literally only have "Chinese rice" on the menu, and the only choice you get is which meats, and if you want fried chicken (!?), french fries (?!) or lumpias as a side. But of the ones that do have chop suey on the menu, the one where i took the above picture is literally the only one that actually had it in stock. That's right. You can ask them "hey can you make me something with vegetables" and they will reply "oh, sorry, we don't have any vegetables, we only have meat". At a fucking Chinese restaurant. Head asplode.
Since i have spent a lot of this post favorably comparing Colombia to Panama, let's close it off with an example of the kind of food you could get at a Chinese restaurant in Panama.
OMG 叉燒包 pork bun! OMG 腸粉 cheung fen! OMG 芥蘭 gai lan! I miss youuuu 😭
So there's a taster of food in Colombia. It's not very spicy. There is a lot of meat. Almost everything that doesn't have meat has dairy. Eating out and trying to remain vegan is extremely difficult, and would leave you eating pretty much only the sides, or relegated to Hare Krishna restaurants and overpriced hipster joints in the major cities. But the fruit juices are very good. And at least on the Caribbean coast it was standard to have hot sauce on all the tables, including a pico de gallo sort of homemade salsa at the more hardcore Costeño joints. Alas i am now heading south, and i anticipate that means the food will get blander. We'll see. I successfully made it through the midwest, so i am battle-hardened at this point. Onward!
Well, onward, after this goddamn food poisoning damaged stomach stops cramping up the moment it gets something more difficult than a banana inside it.
But, onward!