ACPM: An Intro Into the Bogota Restaurant Scene

When I lived in Atlanta, I didn't realize that I was spoiled with the variety and quality of restaurants. After a couple of excursions into the Bogota restaurant scene, I was sorely disappointed in the food available in the city. Though I have heard good things (mostly from Colombians, instead of foreigners), good restaurants are few and far between. For this reason, I am writing about my hits and misses in the Bogota food scene.

Some background info on me is that I enjoy spicy food with a wide variety of tastes. For example, Mexican and Indian food are my favorite and probably the hardest to find in Bogota. I haven't been able to find a decent taco or Mexican restaurant so far. I have tried La Taqueria, Casa Mexicana, El Carnal (probably the worst), and El Museo De Tequila. They all suck, half of them don't even have hardshell tacos, and the cheese dip is like Cheeze-Wiz. I mean, how hard is it to mess up a taco? Apparently, I have seen the worsts forms of the concept “taco”.

The problem is that Colombians have very little knowledge of food outside of Colombia. For them, variety means chicken or beef. This is were the concept of ACPM comes in: Arroz, Carne, Papa, and Maiz. The staples of Colombian cuisine. ACPM means that about 90% of Colombian meals are made up of the same four ingredients. I didn't begin to realize the full impact of ACPM until I stated going out for lunch with my coworkers. All of a sudden I was eating one form of ACMP or another every day for lunch and I was like “hold up”. I can't eat the same thing every day!

The reason why is because even though we would go to different restaurant, we would always order the daily lunch special (Almuero Corriente or Almuero Executivo) because it was the cheapest. It cost about $3 U.S., but it is anything but special because you basically have only two options: chicken or beef. Though it includes a drink (lemonaide or juice), dessert, and soup; it still consists of the basic four ingredients of ACPM. Anyways, at one point I pointed out that there was no variety in our lunch selections and my coworkers responded, “What do you mean, you can choose chicken or beef?!?!”.