With a 121-year history‘Las Margaritas’, one of the oldest restaurants in Colombia, is looking for a buyer to continue the family legacy and traditional recipe this led this small establishment to serve the best Empanadas from Bogotá.
The Ángel Arenas family opened the business in 1902 after moving to the still rustic area of Chapinero, where they have been preparing traditional Bogotá dishes for five generations.
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Since, lived through the “Bogotazo” of 1948, the riots that occurred after the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, when they had to face 15 days of scarcity, and the covid-19 pandemic, which forced them to close for eight months, and since then they have only been open on weekends. Also daily arguments with neighbors that caused power outages.
The biggest threat they have now is the lack of a family heir to take over from the current owner, Julio Ríos, and therefore they are looking for a buyer who wants to continue the tradition of the restaurant because his only son lives in Germany and has a different profession.
“We can stay until we find a client who is affordable and who wants to continue the tradition, because we are clear with our ancestors that this must be immortal (…) We have all the recipes and the important thing is that these people take the soul of it , so that everything remains as before”explains Ríos EFE without, however, showing too much concern about possible closure.
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Special empanada recipe
Las Margaritas Empanadas
Screenshot of Google Maps
The restaurant is also known as ‘Botín de Chapinero’, in honor of the oldest restaurant in the world: ‘El Botín’, located in Spain.
After a century, they continue to preserve the magical empanada recipe of Margarita, the founder of the restaurant and the great-great-grandmother of the current owner. Margarita made them using a wooden pilon, a disused indigenous tool that gave the crushed corn a woody flavor. thus the restaurant received a large number of “empanadas” who visited the place in search of their daily portion of empanadas.
The same pylon continues in the corner of the restaurant, but its heirs now use more modern and faster tools.
“Now we have industrial mills where we grind the same corn kernels and get dough and flour from them; it’s expensive and quite hard work.”” says Ríos, who also emphasizes that they have had to adapt to new raw materials over the decades. At first, the produce came from the garden and the chickens, cows and pigs that the owners had on the same farm.
And they still serve, albeit with different products, the same Bogota foodsuch as ajiaco (potato and chicken soup), cuchuco (corn, barley or wheat soup), sobrebarriga (beef steak in sauce) or tongue.
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“People lined up to get in and came on foot, on horseback or by tram”says Ríos, before pointing out that “there are now many restaurants in Bogotá with food, but not with the spices we have.”
The favorite place of the presidents of Colombia Walls “Las Margaritas” is full of newspaper clippings, articles in which the restaurant was reviewed, photographs with famous figures sitting at their tables, and fragments of the “Diccionario cachaco”, a publication that collected Bogotá words and terms that are no longer in use.
Rulers also entered through its doors; Ríos particularly remembers Eduardo Santos, president from 1938 to 1942, a man “very much from home” who went every weekend even without any escort. “Also relatives of the Saints, relatives of the Liberals more than anything else (…) These people come for their empanadas and they love to come here, it’s a great tradition for everyone.” concludes.
(See: GastroFest, the possibility to eat in Bogota at special prices).
EFE