Colombia’s First Celebrity Chef

If anyone is the face of Colombian food it’s Chef Harry Sasson. Since opening his first restaurant in Bogota in 1995 at age 25 the chef has added four more eateries, written a cookbook, catered for the president of the country, and inspired a generation of up and coming homegrown talent.

“I admire Harry Sasson because he was a pioneer in the field,” says Colombian Chef Daniel Castaño, who was just a teenager when Sasson opened his first restaurant but the Batali alum now heads four of his own restaurants in Bogota. “Twenty years ago Harry Sasson put chefs in the spotlight when no one cared about them or their profession and he did it on his own. Still to this day he has one of the best restaurants in town and it’s better every day.”

Chef Castaño isn’t alone in that assessment. Regularly cited as a must-dine location in the increasingly food-forward capital of Colombia, Sasson’s eponymously-named flagship restaurant, which celebrates 20 years in business next year, was included on the 2013 and 2014 lists of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants and was one of just four Colombian entries to make the list this year.

Sasson, who was trained at the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA), Colombia’s top culinary school, was so anxious to enroll that he almost dropped out of high school because he knew he could start courses with four years of lower school, but no graduation, under his belt. He may have always wanted to be a chef but he seems to prefer to chalk his considerable success up to anything but his own skills in the kitchen.

The chef expands his empire… [pagebreak]

Sasson credits the sizeable talents of his Colombian architects and designers who have created inventive and distinct spaces for his five restaurants in Bogota (Harry Sasson, Balzac, Harry’s Bakery, Harry’s Restaurant & Bar and Club Colombia). They've done so most notably at his flagship where a brick mansion built in 1914 was restored to preservation guidelines while the garden behind the building was enclosed in a vaulted, geometric shell made of custom cut glass and aluminum girders painted white to create a thoroughly modern space. The angular lines of the structure are echoed on the chef’s business card. Dining rooms inside the mansion create different “ambiances” from romantic nooks to assertive power lunch tables to a private chef’s table room.

Maybe it’s the ingredients, the chef suggests. “Every day I’m looking for a fresher piece of fish, a better piece of meat, tastier hearts of palm so that you taste the difference between our food and other people’s food,” he says. Specialty ingredients are picked up at the airport in Bogota daily and my dinner at Harry Sasson included many of them including a riotous plate of langosta, salmon and mero tartare with small flavor bombs of fresh citrus on top. Then there was an oven skillet from the restaurant’s mozzarella bar with two types of melted cheese and rich, sweet tomatoes. 

But it was a simple dish of grilled wild heart of palm from the Putumayo region of Colombia that proved the most memorable. A one inch diameter shoot of fresh palm heart was sliced in half, seasoned with sea salt and pepper, and grilled over wood. The finished palm was firm but tender (erase all notions of canned hearts of palm from your mind) with a flavor that reminded me of the choicest artichoke heart. Delicate smokiness and rich salt asserted themselves with every bite.

Next, Sasson unveils his next big project… [pagebreak]

That palm dish is not only an illustration of Sasson’s commitment to ingredients but of his food fame as well. During the Uribe administration the then-president’s wife asked Sasson to help teach Colombians how to prepare and eat their indigenous heart of palm because building a market for the product was an important element of the first lady’s plan to convince farmers who were growing coca to shift to a legal cash crop.

Sasson even credits the battery of kitchen equipment he’s come to depend on over the years including a Japanese style volcanic stone grill, Vulcan ranges, top-shelf coffee makers, and anything that will let him light a fire. “I love cooking with wood,” he says. The kitchen in his flagship restaurant is such a toy chest that when Harry’s brother and business partner Saul showed me around, he shook his head and muttered “Harry had better make this work.” As if there was any question.

On November 1, 2014 Sasson will open his sixth restaurant and the first one outside of Bogota. It will be a 200 seat restaurant located in the Charleston Santa Teresa Hotel in the flawless Colonial center of Cartagena. Sasson says the menu will be similar to the wide-ranging international fare offered at Harry’s Restaurant & Bar with an emphasis on seafood. In true Sasson fashion, he’s had a special kitchen tool installed: an over-sized plancha just for the purpose of making the most of the Caribbean bounty on his new doorstep.