Ajiaco: Bogotá's chicken-and-potato soup, and how to order it

Overview

Ajiaco is a thick soup of chicken and potato that eats like a meal, and in this city it is the dish rather than a dish. The full name is ajiaco santafereño, after Santafé, the colonial name of the town that became Bogotá, and the word marks it as the highland, capital-city version of a name used loosely across the mountains for very different things. Here it means one specific thing.

What makes it that specific thing is two ingredients, not the chicken. The first is the potato, used in three kinds at once: a small yellow one, papa criolla, that dissolves almost completely and thickens the broth into something closer to a loose porridge than a soup; and two firmer white varieties, pastusa and sabanera, cut larger so they hold their shape and give something to chew. A single potato cannot do both jobs, which is why one variety is never enough. The second is guascas (the herb Galinsoga parviflora, a roadside weed almost everywhere else), whose slightly green, artichoke-and-lime flavour is the taste people mean when they say a bowl “tastes like ajiaco”. Without it you have chicken soup; with it you have this.

The origin story is real history rather than folklore, and it is worth telling straight. The potato-and-guascas base is genuinely pre-Hispanic: the Muisca, who farmed the cold Cundinamarca plateau around the city, grew many potato varieties and cooked them with native herbs long before the Spanish arrived. The chicken, the capers and the cream that finish the modern bowl are colonial additions layered on top. So ajiaco is a fusion with a long indigenous root, not a dish someone invented on a datable afternoon — and there is no protected designation fixing its recipe, which is why every household version differs and all of them are defensible.

It is cold-weather food, which in a city sitting above 2,600 metres means most of the year. That is not a quaint detail: the soup exists because the climate asks for it.

What to order

You order ajiaco, or ajiaco santafereño if you want to be precise, and then the real decision is what arrives alongside it. A proper bowl comes with three things served separately, for you to add yourself: a small dish of alcaparras (capers), a jug or cup of crema de leche (a pouring cream, not sour cream), and slices of aguacate (avocado). A piece of corn on the cob — mazorca — is usually in the bowl or on the side, and you eat it with your hands between spoonfuls.

The move that marks you as knowing what you are doing is simple: add the cream and a spoon of capers into the soup, not onto the side of the plate, and squeeze or drop the avocado in last. The cream softens and enriches, the capers cut it with salt and acid, the corn is sweet against the herb. A bowl eaten plain, without working the garnishes in, is a bowl half-experienced.

A few words that help. Con todo — “with everything” — confirms you want all the garnishes, and you do. Rice, arroz, often comes on the side; you can eat it apart or add spoonfuls to the soup, both are normal. If you are asked whether you want the presa, that is your piece of chicken — a bone-in portion is the traditional answer and gives more flavour than a tidy breast. None of this is a test; it is just the vocabulary that gets you the version a local would recognise.

What to avoid

The single most useful warning is about the herb. A version made without guascas is not ajiaco santafereño, whatever the menu calls it, and it is the corner most often cut because the herb is perishable and specific. If a bowl tastes green-and-fresh in a coriander direction rather than that particular artichoke-lime way, or tastes of nothing but chicken and potato, the defining ingredient was left out.

The second is thickness. The whole point of the papa criolla is that it melts and bodies the broth; a thin, clear, watery ajiaco where the potatoes all sit whole in liquid means the dissolving potato was skipped or skimped. You want it to coat the spoon.

Then there is the name trap, which matters more here than for most dishes. “Ajiaco” elsewhere is a completely different food — the Cuban ajiaco is a meat-and-root-vegetable stew, the Chilean one another thing again — so a place trading on tourists, or a fusion menu, may serve something under this word that has nothing to do with the highland soup. In this city the real thing is chicken, three potatoes, corn and guascas; anything billed as ajiaco that omits those is either from somewhere else or hoping you won’t know the difference. The tell is on the plate, not on a sign: no separate dishes of capers, cream and avocado arriving with it is the clearest sign the kitchen is not treating it as the local dish.

Practicalities

Ajiaco is lunch food above all, eaten in the middle of the day when the appetite for something this substantial is real; a set-lunch corrientazo often has it as the soup course, and that is one of the honest cheap ways to try it. It keeps no season in the calendar sense, but it belongs to grey, cool, wet afternoons — and Bogotá supplies those generously, so the best time to order it is simply the next cold one.

On price, the spread is wide and tells you what kind of room you are in. A bowl inside a budget corrientazo menu runs roughly 12,000 to 18,000 pesos — about £2.50 to £4 — and at that price it is a set meal, not a bad sign. A dedicated sit-down plate in a proper restaurant is more like 25,000 to 40,000 pesos, roughly £5 to £8, and the extra buys the setting and the generous garnishes rather than a better soup. A figure well above that is paying for a view or a tablecloth; ajiaco does not get twice as good at twice the price, because it was never restaurant food to begin with.

The cheapest and often best versions are in the covered produce markets, where stalls cook it for the traders and it is unfussy and enormous. Those stalls are the likeliest to be cash-only, so bring some — small notes are easier than a large one at a market counter. In ordinary restaurants a card is fine, in line with how the rest of the city works. And eat it hot: the melted potato that gives ajiaco its body also makes it heavy as it cools, so the first bowl, steaming, is a different and better thing than the same bowl gone lukewarm while you talk.