Quinua y Amaranto, a vegetarian restaurant in the La Candelaria neighbourhood of Bogotá, offers much more than just good products and good food. A chat with Magdalena Barón, who has managed this project for more than eight years, generates ideas, words, and questions. The tranquility and thoughtfulness with which she speaks are refreshing. Her short pauses reflect a women who has built, over time and life experience, a connection between herself and what she believes, what she does, offers, and consumes. Remembering her while I write, I have the feeling of having spoken with someone who wants to be consistent in what she thinks and feels in her heart.
Without really knowing her, I’m just writing personal impressions here, and probably risk boring readers who like objective writing. But faced with the need for proof or justifications, all I can say is that the coherence she communicates is reflected in the work she does with the other women in Quinua y Amaranto every day. Work which is seen, smelt, and tasted at lunchtime, in a single menu consisting of a soup, main dish, juice, and dessert: a vegetarian corrientazo (basic meal) which has nothing basic or common about it. Flavours, smells and colours, juices, salads, sweets and cereals which, despite being from our continent, are largely unknown to us. Fruits, seeds and roots which we don’t use at home, which we don’t grow, whose smell we don’t know, and whose colour and shape we can’t even imagine. Our high-speed cooking limits us, and curiosity about ourselves falls asleep.
As well as telling us about quinoa and amaranth, the star products of the restaurant, Magdalena also talked about guatila, a food which is scorned as the “poor-person’s potato,” in the same way in which chicha was also looked down on for its supposed power to stupefy. She told us about mamay and arazá, amongst many more fruits and products which are a whole story in themselves, seeds of other items.
Beyond letting people know about a fruit or cereal known, this shop invites us to re-view everything that we are. It invites us to re-discover and value the forgotten as a key act in consuming, buying, cooking, and eating. It’s not simply about a vegetarian restaurant, it’s a place with a caring approach to work and commerce which questions our consumption habits. In a world where progress is synonymous with untiring machinery, speed, economic growth, and purchasing power, finding people that know and trust small-scale producers, offer a good quality product, without hurry, and small-scale, is always a nice surprise. Magdalena doesn’t sacrifice quality for quantity. For her, the success or progress of a business is not measured in franchises or in large-scale production, rather in constant evolution which doesn’t override principles, philosophy or the way in which life itself is lived and dreamed.
In Quinua y Amaranto, the variety is not in a menu full of different dishes, but rather in the particularity of the ingredients which are used and the way in which they are prepared. Vegetables, empanadas, condiments, biscuits, cereals, fruits, infusions, artisanal cheeses, products as far as possible organic. The importance of knowing the value of what’s on offer and that every project, whether it’s commercial or not, has a direction and clear guidelines so as not to sacrifice, in the name of progress, what they believe.
