It serves vegetarian starters, burgers, and wraps made from lentils or chickpeas. After the meat fatigue, we were delighted to come across an entirely vegetarian restaurant in Zona Rosa by the name of Lenteja Express. Plates at restaurants tend to be meat-centric and occasionally come with a sad lettuce-and-tomato vegetable pile, although more often they’re heaped with fries. Recommendation: If you’re a lover of deep-fried breakfast treats, pull up a seat here and a few buñelos with a fried egg arepa and drink of your choice-I’d go with a hot Milo.įinding vegetables can be hard while travelling, even when you’re not looking to eat exclusively vegetarian food. Two of these make a heavy, filling breakfast. The fried egg arepa: an egg somehow cracked into an arepa and then all fried together. Note that buñelos are sold at practically every bakery in Medellin, but Buñelos Supreme is where we found the best. Each buñelo is expertly hand-formed and fried by him. Fresh hot buñelos nestled together in a bowl.Īnd since people regularly come in and order 30 at a time, you can watch them being made all morning: The buñelo-maker, hard at work. At 500 COP (17 US cents) a pop, it’s easy to down 5 or 6 of these for breakfast alongside an egg-filled arepa. The second must try are the buñelos from Buñelos supreme, a tasty deep-fried breakfast treat made of flour, tapioca flour, and cheese. You’re going to need their help against the massive Mondongo. That’s the normal size of avocadoes in Colombia. Why yes, that avocado is nearly the size of a banana. You’re supposed to dump the rice, avocado slices, and banana slices directly into the mix, but we ate them in separate spoonfuls for a delightful contrast in flavors and textures. When we asked to share one, they kindly pre-split the soup for us, so this is half the amount you’d normally get.Īs for how the Mondongo tasted, here’s the best description I can muster: a rich, meaty tomato broth, loaded with FOUR kinds of meat (beef, pork, chicken, and tripe), potatoes, and onions. Perhaps their stomachs were part of some kind of space-time distortion. They were tiny, so I have no idea where that food went. The great part was that while we were struggling to finish our food, a pair of abuelitas came in, each ordered a Mondongo, and demolished them. We asked to share, and even then we couldn’t finish the whole thing. We had to double check that was indeed one order. Wondering if we could share, we asked the waiter about the size of the Mondongo and he pointed over to a nearby table with a bucket-sized bowl of soup, a plate of rice, slices of avocado, bananas, and arepas. When it came to ordering, we were a bit nervous because Mondongo’s was really expensive by Colombian standards (a Mondongo costs around $10 USD, or 30,000 COP). They even insisted on helping us put our bags on to the chairs instead of on the floor: Our bags, our ever constant traveling companions. On the afternoon we wandered in, we found a quiet patio with attentive waiters. Mondongo’s is an institution in Medellín, serving up hearty soups and grilled meats to the hungry Colombian locals. And every time, from the kids in high school to the abuelitas out for an afternoon stroll, we got one answer: get the Mondongo at Mondongo’s. Since the locals almost always know best, we asked around for the ONE thing we should try in Zona Rosa before leaving. There are two must try’s here: the Mondongo and the buñelos. Regardless of what you choose, get ready to eat to your heart’s content. This post will cover awesome main meal options we discovered: two restaurants offering traditional foods, and one spotlight on a great health/vegetarian restauarant. We covered the delicious dessert options of Zona Rosa in our previous post. We spent most of our time in Zona Rosa enjoying the relative comfort of the Panela Hostel 2 and eating amazing food. And while the prices definitely reflect the area, clocking in around 1.5-3 times that of other places in the city, they’re still highly affordable if you’re coming from a country like the U.S. Stroll down one of these streets and you could easily imagine you’re in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or any other major metropolitan hub. Zona Rosa is Medellín’s happening tourist spot, with all of the hippest shops, bars, and restaurants. Zona Rosa People sit in front of a Christmas lights display at a park in Zona Rosa
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