Ceviche Atomico: the best ceviche in the Pacific in Plaza Perseverancia
We went to the Plaza de la Perseverancia to try the unique mixed ceviche with sweet chili and lulo and sour guava chutney from Ceviche Atomico. This is its story and that of its owner and chef, Miguel Abadía.
Juan de Santa Gertrudis was a Spanish missionary who in 1756 came to Tumaco to propagandize his God and his crown. The natives received him with a salad of green papaya and clams that Santa Gertrudis could never forget. In his memoirs, in the third volume, he wrote that it was the most fantastic dish he had ever tasted.
Miguel Abadía was born in Quibdó forty years ago. When he finished school he won a scholarship and went to Paris to study Political Science. Thanks to the ticket they give students to eat in the market squares of the big city, he learned about the typical food of Burgundy, Brittany, Normandy, and Alsace.
In the Château-Rouge District, the mecca of African food north of Paris, he tasted and recorded the convergences between the food of the Colombian Pacific and that of the entire black continent.
Without abandoning his studies in Political Science, fascinated with the encyclopedic record of French gastronomy since the 18th century – that which Proust, Balzac, Monnet drew on – he began to get into the kitchen. As he did when he was very young, in Quibdó, to help his mother who, by seasoning delicacies, raised six children.
He worked in restaurants serving classic French, African and also Southeast Asian cuisine.
He graduated and then wanted to return to write down the gastronomic tradition of the Pacific, diffuse and shaky because it has been transmitted orally. Like the conversations between his mother and the neighbors that Abadía overheard while he helped chop.
He read Juan de Santa Gertrudis. He traveled to Tumaco. He found no hint of the famous green papaya and clam salad. A ghost plate. Like how many more?
His bewilderment led him to fully investigate the lost treasures. His investigations and rescues earned him the National Gastronomy Award. With the allocated money he continued researching, this time the ingredients and techniques of ancestral tradition in Afro cuisine, throughout the Colombian Pacific.
This is how Atomic Ceviche was born
Seven years ago, as an act of resistance, tribute and dissemination of black and Pacific food, he set up the Ceviche Atómico restaurant in the Plaza de la Perseverancia in Bogotá. The mixed fish and shrimp ceviche with sweet chili sauce and Chocoan lulo and sour guava chutney has not received a bad comment in the history of the restaurant. And although his specialty is ceviches, Abadía can’t help but smile and salivate when he talks about his chocoano rice, the typical one, with sausage. He also confesses that his secret is in the herbs – wild coriander, pennyroyal – and in the fruits, so abundant in his land, and which he knows how to turn into mysterious vinegars.
The Atomic Ceviche got its name because Abadía believes that ingredients, like atoms, when melted with others create molecules. Each flavor is a molecule. The mastery is then in the proportion of the ingredients. In its origin and in its history.
A few months ago, in another place he has in the square, in complicity with 50 women viche producers from the Pacific, he brought to the public the atomic pairing Ceviche with Viche, in case something was needed.
Although Abadía sees with pessimism that the government, some government, understands the dimension of the wealth and gastronomic tradition of Colombia and with public policies converts it – as France, Mexico, Peru did – into a social, cultural and economic heritage, he continues to investigate. . She continues traveling, testing, gathering atoms. She earned a two-year training in innovation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in which her thesis was a sustainable rural food market in an urban center.
This is what is already happening in their stores in the plaza. Local suppliers, artisanal fishing, fair prices, research and historical awareness.
If you want to try it more than believe it, go for viches and ceviches at Ceviche Atómico.
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