A lunch where the meat dries on a washing line

"La vida se alimenta de vida." Life feeds on life. That is printed on the receipt and it is a slightly cheeky slogan for a restaurant where lunch costs about eight pounds.

It is called La Casa del Alimento, you sit in the garden, and it is one of those places that makes you want nothing else all day.

How a Colombian lunch works

This is something I only understood here, and it is worth explaining because you can budget by it.

Almuerzo, lunch, is served roughly from noon to three, and it is not one dish, it is a whole set. The price of the main course includes a starter, the main, a dessert, a drink and coffee or a herbal infusion. When you order the item at 56,000 pesos here, you do not get a plate, you get a lunch.

That is why menu numbers cannot be compared with Czech prices for main courses. The only fair comparison is with a set lunch including dessert and a drink, and at that point it looks completely different.

What we ate

The starter was stewed vegetables, onion, pepper, courgette and carrot, with three small buñuelos. A buñuelo is a fried ball of corn starch and fresh cheese, crisp outside, soft and mildly salty inside. Normally it is breakfast; here they were the size of marbles and served as the bread to the starter.

Main course number six was arroz sofrito. Fried rice dyed orange with achiote, with prawns, pieces of fish, air dried beef, plantain and peas, topped with grated coastal queso costeño. It is the Colombian version of what a European would call risotto or paella, and it is neither: the rice is loose, not creamy, and the flavour is carried by achiote and dried meat, not saffron.

Main course number seven was tilapia. A whole grilled fillet with a small pot of mussels in sauce, plantain chicharrón, crisp yuca and salad. Tilapia is a freshwater fish, farmed in ponds all over Colombia, and it is the most common fish on a plate here.

Dessert was a banana cake with whipped cream and chocolate crumble, with a tinto, the small black coffee.

Beef on a washing line

The most interesting thing about that lunch was hanging in the yard.

On a line, like laundry, sheets of beef were drying. Not under a roof, not in a larder, out in the garden in the open air, right where people sit.

This is called carne oreada, literally aired meat. It is an Antioquian technique: the meat is salted, hung in the air and allowed to wilt rather than dry to stone the way biltong does. It stays soft, it just loses water and concentrates flavour. Then it is grilled.

And it was exactly what I had in my rice. A restaurant that airs its own meat in the yard and then puts it in a dish it names on the menu.

As a safety guy this interested me twice over. Air drying meat is a process a Czech public health inspector would have views about, and at our temperatures and humidity, rightly so. Here the weather is nearly identical all year, the air is dry and mountain thin, and the technique is older than the refrigerator. That does not make it automatically safe. It means it came from somewhere it works.

What it cost

The bill: 68,000 for the rice, 56,000 for the tilapia, 9,000 for a ginger lemonade. That is 133,000 pesos.

On top of that a voluntary service charge of 13,000, ten percent. "Voluntario" on the receipt means exactly what it says: the waiter asks whether to add it and you can say no. Most people pay it.

The total was 146,000 pesos, which at today's rate is roughly thirty pounds for two complete lunches including drinks and dessert. Fifteen each.

And one more thing it says on the receipt: paying by card carries a five percent surcharge. That is not a terminal fault or a scam, it is common at smaller places here, and it is the reason to carry cash. Five percent on one lunch bill hurts nobody, but five percent on every payment for a month adds up.