Visitors often ask for Colombia’s national dish. Better to ask where you are standing. Colombian food changes with altitude and coastline: potato soup in the cool highlands around Bogotá, beans and pork in Antioquia, fried fish and coconut rice on the Caribbean, catfish in coconut milk on the Pacific. The famous plates taste best where they were born, and the day runs on its own clock: a cooked breakfast, a big lunch, a simple dinner.
The bandeja paisa (“paisa platter”, after the nickname for people from Antioquia) was built to feed coffee pickers on steep slopes, and it shows: ground beef, red beans, rice, chicharrón (fried pork belly), chorizo, morcilla (blood sausage), fried plantain, a fried egg, an arepa, avocado and hogao, a tomato and onion sauce. The beans are its heart: Antioquia cooks frijoles slowly with pork, often the pig’s foot (garra). Make it your main meal of the day.
Bogotá’s signature dish is a soup that eats like a meal. Ajiaco santafereño combines three kinds of highland potato with chicken, corn on the cob and guasca, a local herb, and arrives with capers, cream, avocado and rice on the side. It is the classic Sunday family lunch.
Here the cooking turns to coconut and the sea: a whole fried fish, often mojarra or snapper, with coconut rice and patacones (fried green plantain), better still on a beach, or cazuela de mariscos, a seafood stew made creamy with coconut milk. Peru is not the only country with ceviche, either. Look for ceviche de camarón, made with shrimp. The street snack is the arepa de huevo, a corn arepa with an egg fried inside it, and in Cartagena, order posta cartagenera, the city’s braised beef.
African heritage shows most clearly on the Pacific, where Afro-Colombian cooks work with coconut, plantain and local fish. Try pusandao, catfish stewed in coconut milk with yuca, potato and plantain, or arroz atollado with crab from Guapi, rice cooked soupy in broth and coconut milk, and finish with cocadas, sweets of coconut and panela. Cali’s Petronio Álvarez Pacific Music Festival, every August, has a food pavilion run by traditional cooks. Our Colombia Coffee and Caribbean itinerary includes Nuquí on the Chocó coast, where this is everyday cooking.
On the Llanos, the plains east of the Andes and the cattle country of the llaneros (plains cowboys), mamona (carne a la llanera, plains-style meat) is veal cooked slowly on skewers over the fire. Tolima’s lechona is a whole pig stuffed with seasoned rice and peas, baked about twelve hours until the skin turns crisp. The Valle del Cauca’s sancocho is a soup-stew of meat, plantain, yuca and corn, different in every family. Santander supplies the boldest snack in the country: hormigas culonas (“big-bottomed ants”), eaten there for more than 500 years.
| Region | Look for | Drink with it |
|---|---|---|
| Antioquia and the Coffee Region | Bandeja paisa, frijoles, arepa paisa | Tinto |
| Bogotá and the highlands | Ajiaco, changua, tamal | Chocolate santafereño |
| Caribbean coast | Fried fish with coconut rice, arepa de huevo, cazuela de mariscos | Corozo juice |
| Pacific coast | Pusandao, arroz atollado, cocadas | Borojó juice, viche |
| Llanos | Mamona | Guarapo |
| Tolima and Santander | Lechona, hormigas culonas | Limonada de panela |
| Valle del Cauca | Sancocho, arepa de choclo | Fresh fruit juice |
The arepa, a round corn cake eaten with butter, cheese or an egg, is the constant, and no two regions make it alike. In Antioquia the arepa paisa (also arepa de tela) is thin, flat and made to go with almost anything. On the Caribbean coast, especially in Cartagena and Barranquilla, the arepa de huevo hides its egg. The Valle del Cauca makes arepa de choclo from sweet, tender corn, and Boyacá’s arepa boyacense is slightly sweet and filled with fresh cheese.
Breakfast falls between 7 and 9 a.m., and it is a proper meal: Kantar’s national household panel found that more than 72% of it is cooked food or prepared drinks. Expect pericos (scrambled eggs), an arepa, a tamal steamed in a banana leaf, or calentado, yesterday’s rice and beans fried up again. Bogotá adds changua, a broth of milk with egg, onion and cilantro. To drink, a tinto (black coffee) or hot chocolate.
Lunch runs from about 12 to 2:30 or 3 p.m., and it is the most elaborate meal of the day. On working days many people eat the almuerzo corriente, nicknamed the corrientazo or listed as the menú del día: a soup, then the seco (rice, meat or fish, plantain or potato, salad and a side of beans or lentils), a glass of fresh juice and sometimes dessert. It is served at the table, not a buffet; the almuerzo ejecutivo is the pricier step up. Order one at least once. It is the everyday Colombian lunch.
In Bogotá the afternoon pause is onces, built around chocolate santafereño: very hot chocolate with pieces of cheese dropped into the cup to soften, and buttered bread for dunking. Dinner is the simpler meal, most often coffee and a sandwich.
Colombia has no real seasons, so something is always ripe. Ask for lulo (naranjilla elsewhere); maracuyá (passion fruit) and its purple cousin gulupa; guanábana (soursop); uchuva (golden berry); tomate de árbol (tree tomato); and from the Pacific, borojó, blended into juice with water or milk. Most of it becomes juice, which comes with the set lunch, and in Cartagena’s walled city street stalls sell lulo and guanábana juice by the glass. For everything under one roof, Bogotá’s Paloquemao market, more than 70 years old with nearly 900 stalls, gathers fruit from every region.
Colombian coffee is famous. True, with a catch. The country exports about 93% of what it grows, BBC Mundo reported in 2020, and for decades the best grades went abroad while cheaper beans stayed home. The everyday tinto, strong and black, often sweetened with panela (unrefined cane sugar), is not the cup behind the reputation. Drink it anyway. A perico is a cortado, coffee with a little milk; at breakfast, pericos are scrambled eggs.
The better cup is closer to the farms. Colombian specialty coffees now win international awards, and the place to taste them is the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia, inscribed by UNESCO in 2011: six farming landscapes and 18 hilltop towns across Caldas, Quindío, Risaralda and Valle del Cauca, where many haciendas take guests. Our five-day Colombia Coffee Region itinerary includes a farm stay, tastings, Salento and Filandia; see all our Colombia coffee region tours.
The Juan Valdez cafés are the coffee growers’ own brand: the first opened at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport in 2002, and the brand has since reached the US and Europe. If coffee is not your drink, order an aromática, an infusion of fresh fruit and herbs.
Aguardiente is what Colombians call their national liquor, distilled from sugarcane and flavored with anise. Departmental distilleries make it; Antioqueño and Tapa Roja are two of the best known. Heated with cinnamon and sugar, it becomes canelazo. The Pacific has viche, distilled by hand from fermented sugarcane juice and recognized by a 2021 law as the collective heritage of the region’s Afro-Colombian communities.
For beer, Águila and Poker are the best-known names, and Club Colombia is the premium label. Without alcohol: limonada de panela (water, grated panela, lemon) in the highlands, guarapo (pineapple and panela) on the Llanos, and on the Caribbean, juice of corozo, a sweet-tart local fruit. Take corozo thin, not thick, until you are used to it.
Street and market food are part of the point; eat with judgment, not fear. The CDC notes that food and water standards can differ within a country and suggests considering a typhoid vaccine for rural travel, long stays or places with poor sanitation. Our Colombia health page covers the rest, including altitude.
A restaurant may suggest a tip (propina) on the bill. By law it is voluntary, it may not exceed 10% when suggested, and you can decline it or change the amount. Our Colombia money guide covers tipping, and the Colombian Spanish guide has the words worth knowing. When you want a change, Bogotá also has good Peruvian, Italian and French kitchens, and Medellín’s chefs cook well beyond the bandeja paisa.
Plan meals like sights: lunch as the main event, a morning at a market, a meal on each coast. Our Colombia Gourmet Tour links Bogotá, the Coffee Region and Cartagena, with room for markets and cooking classes. Browse our Colombia food and wine tours, or start with Colombia and ask us to design a trip that gives the table as much time as the sights.
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