Restaurants

From the hearty stews served in the highlands to the seafood soups ladled out along the Caribbean coast, you'll find distinctive regional cuisine everywhere. For breakfast you'll see an array of arepas, a small, round flatbread made of ground corn, often stuffed with egg or cheese, served with hogao, a cooked tomato-and-onion relish, and suero costeño, a lightly acidic local sour cream. Beef is popular everywhere, as is chicken. Bogotá's most traditional dish is ajiaco, a thick chicken-and-potato soup garnished with capers, sour cream, and avocado, while Medellín prides itself on its local sausages and monstrous bandeja paisa, a plate piled with rice, beans, ground beef, fried plantain, sausages and chicharrón, a deep-fried strip of thick-cut bacon. On the Caribbean coast you're more likely to dip your spoon into a cazuela de mariscos, a seafood soup with cassava. On the islands of San Andrés and Providencia the local favorite is rondón, a soup made of fish and snails slowly simmered in coconut milk with yucca, plantains, breadfruit, and dumplings.

Restaurants in many cities often close for a few hours between lunch and dinner (roughly 3 to 6). Appropriate attire in restaurants is comparable to U.S. or European standards—dressy for the more formal places, casual everywhere else. In many restaurants, bars, and cafés a 10% service charge is automatically added to the bill; if not, a 10% tip is expected.