Hang onto your hats. This legendary steakhouse blows everyone away – even repeat visitors – for its all-out-fun atmosphere with decent steaks and all sorts of surreal decor and designed gimmicks such as menus retracting from the rafters. For most, it’s more than a meal – but a leave-the-watch-at-home expanse of late-night rumba. Staff will get you on the floor if you resist joining in. The catch is that it’s out of town – in Chía, 23km north towards Zipaquirá.

In recent years, Bogotá has emerged as an appetising destination for foodies. And while passionate gastronomes flock to high-end, sophisticated international eateries in a gourmet district known as Zona G, the one restaurant that should be included on every trip to Colombia's capital isn't in this area – or in the city at all. Rather, the legendary Andrés Carne de Res is practically a city in and of itself. About 45 minutes away by car, in Chia, the seven-square-kilometer spectacle is a steakhouse, bar, and dance club all rolled into one, and it's a truly one-of-a-kind. Its humble beginnings date back to 1982, when founder Andrés Jaramillo opened a tiny roadside grill serving excellent beef—carne de res to the locals. It took off quickly, snowballing to the restaurant that now sprawls over multiple city blocks seats some 2,000 diners, with staff well into the hundreds. But while it holds heaps of people, Andrés is often full, so making a reservation is wise. On Friday and Saturday nights, a cover charge ranging from 10,000 to 15,000 Colombian pesos— to Australian dollars—is paid at a booth where you might spot staff in fantastical costumes or someone painted elaborately in Day of the Dead makeup. But its sheer size is not the only reason Andrés is so very memorable. It's a production, an experience—a feast for the eyes as much as for the tastebuds. The behemoth landmark is surrounded by colorful cow statues—a tribute to the primary protein served here—and glowing red hearts. Upon approach, you'll participate in a rite of passage: a small shot of the restaurant's own brand of tequila in a hollowed out lime half, served with a bright yellow, tangy uchuva fruit, also known as goldenberry. You'll also pass a station piled with strawberries to further whet your appetite and usher you into the singular world of Andrés Carne de Res. From your first step inside, you won't know where to look. Objects—of art, tchotchkes, neon signs, memorabilia—cover every centimeter of the dim, sprawling space, which is divided into intimate nooks and dining areas that wind maze-like to bars and dance floors. With no apparent rhyme or reason to the way décor is styled, it's as if an enthusiastic hoarder turned over his eclectic lifetime stash, and the effect is chaotic yet charming. The gargantuan menu is as overwhelming as the atmosphere, and about as hefty as a September issue of Vogue. But joyously so—everything is incredibly flavorful, perfectly prepared and fresh tasting. Order the mojito in a coconut shell bowl (.50) and some chicharrónes (life-changing pieces of fried pork rind, ), and peruse the dozens of pages dedicated to varieties of sizzling chorizo, stuffed arepas, chilled ceviches, 20 kinds of cheese and, as the name would imply, meat. There are near-countless salads, empanadas, soups and veggies as well, but carne is the main event. Adventurous—and hungry—meat-lovers can sample virtually every grilled protein imaginable (sirloin, pork ribs, flank steak, blood sausage, and more) via the all-encompassing and mouthwatering parrillada de la casa, which costs around , while single servings of the restaurant's truly great steaks (which come with authentic arrays of sides) start around for 200 grams. But don't expect to simply sit and eat your food at Andrés, because every night is a party. Andrés virgins are honored with a song and given paper crowns and red, yellow, and blue-striped sashes (Colombia's colors) that say "Honores de la Casa", which translates to "Honors of the House". And even if you don't like to dance, it's impossible to eat an entire meal without giving into the urge to get up and shake your hips—Andrés just has that effect. It's practically a given that at some point you'll salsa along to an infectious Carlos Vives hit. When all the dancing and dining is done, late-night fare is available right outside, and there are "angels" to drive you home. Yes, Andrés takes care of everything, even providing sober Designated Drivers who'll drive you back to Bogotá in the comfort of your own car for around . The experience may be over, but the buzz will linger.

Bogotá, like any important capital, has no shortage of impressive eateries featuring haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, exclusive “cavas” or wine cellars, and white tablecloth establishments suitable for power lunches or deal-making dinners. Andrés Carne De Res is not one of those places. Neither is its urban younger outpost, Andrés DC, located in Bogotá’s upscale and touristy “Zona T” in the capital’s northeast. The original Andres Carne De Res is in the far northern suburb of Chia, requiring a sometimes lengthy trip, making it a destination. The urban version of the famous attraction however, Andres DC, is in the very upscale “El Retiro” Shopping Center. While Andres DC is not cheap; there is a sign hanging from the ceiling in the restaurant mocking itself saying “Bueno, Bonito, Carito” (Good, Pretty, Expensive), it is not a white-tablecloth type of place, either—rather a casual, fun destination. Imagine perhaps if directors Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro got drunk off of Colombian Aguardiente and decided to open a restaurant where money was apparently no object. The result probably would not be too far off of Andres DC. A patron half expects Beetlejuice himself to step out and offer a menu. In Andrés DC, every day is Halloween, happy birthday, and New Year’s Eve all wrapped up into one. This popular eatery is a sprawling four stories high and open for lunch and dinner seven days a week. It is rambunctious and rowdy, and every staff member from the dishwasher to the general manager is an entertainer. The best way to describe Andres DC may be as a restaurant disguised as a circus…but then again, maybe a circus disguised as a restaurant. Upon seating, the host or hostess queries you to determine if your visit is to celebrate some special occasion; a primary reason people visit. If so, they will prepare special attention for your table. During the author’s last visit, there were couples celebrating a birthday, a large family that took up three tables with a contingent of teens and pre-teens (Andres is family friendly, but very appropriate for a date or an informal business celebration), ladies catching up on gossip while shopping in El Retiro and the adjacent Andino mall, and of course, tourists. Most restaurant business experts admonish operators to keep menus limited and simple. Once again, Andres DC breaks the rules: the menu is a whopping 66 pages! That being said, they do not slack on quality control. The bilingual menu features appetizers from the modestly priced empanada de carne (just under US) to the tostón con todo – a giant disk of pounded plantain topped with over a pound of cheese, ground beef, pork rinds, mushrooms, and other side dishes (yes, the appetizer comes with side dishes) for about US. Most steak cuts run about per entrée, including sides, but then there is the “Posta de Punta de Anca” a sirloin over two pounds and serving eight diners. Topped with bacon, it comes with salad and mashed potatoes in a clay bowl. Serving eight at about US, it is the most expensive item on the grill menu, but actually inexpensive for feeding a party that size. Seafood offerings are extensive, especially for a non-seafood specialty restaurant in Colombia’s Andes. Caribbean, Peruvian, Ecuadorean, and Ceviche preparations are offered as options. A pair of jumbo shrimp with patacones (large plantain tostones) is less than , while the cazuela de mariscos, a shrimp, lobster and cheese casserole served with patacones and white rice, runs just over . Most seafood dishes are actually under , and include favorites such as coconut grouper, red snapper, cobia in papillote (paper bag technique)—confusingly they translate cobia as kingfish, but in the US at least, cobia is cobia and kingfish is the king mackerel, known as the carite in Spanish. Trout, salmon, and the ubiquitous bagre, a South American catfish are also on the menu. Andres DC features over a dozen pages of beverages, with everything from fruit juices served in bowls and coffees to liquor and cocktails. The food is well prepared, though the reason to go to Andrés is for the dining experience. Bands of roving troubadours go from table to table serenading diners with musical instruments and song. At any moment all the waitresses might line up and perform a choreographed dance without warning, and a parade of clowns could show in a march set to a (completely inappropriate) Mozart sonnet. The décor is something like steam-punk meets Ringling Brothers, and even though the restaurant is towering and gigantic—a truly huge venue, it fills up quickly and consistently, so reservations are advised. The restaurant is so big that after the first floor entry, there are elevators with operators who take you up to your assigned floor. It is loud, rambunctious, and rowdy, so dress the way you like. In the very likely event that a reservation at Andres DC is not available, or the restaurant is already full to walk-in traffic, there are two options. One could trek to the Chia location, which then offers a return taxi to Bogotá for about US, or one could visit La Plaza de Andres, the quick service “food court” associated with the restaurant, accessible from within the El Retiro mall. “Food court” doesn’t really do it justice. Operated by Andres DC, it is more like a gourmet bazaar with dessert and bread bakeries, drinks, more live entertainment, ice cream shops, butchers, candy stores, grills, multiple concepts for both gourmet purchase, or on site quick service dining. It is an attraction in its own right and a welcome escape from the homogenized global offerings found apparently in the same food courts on every continent. Plaza de Andrés is worthy of its own visit. Parking is available in the El Retiro mall, or Andrés offers a secure, private taxi service for patrons from Andrés DC to anywhere in Bogotá for . Andrés strongly recommends making reservations at least two weeks in advance. They also have ample accommodations for parties (children, family and adult), seminars and events hosting between 12 and 30 people. The restaurants may be contacted by phone by dialing in Colombia (or country code 57) Bogotá area code 1: 861-2233 or 863-7880. From the USA one would dial: 011-571 861-2233, for example.

Andres Jaramillo is Colombia’s Ambassador of “good times.” As the mastermind of the magic that drives the most successful and famous restaurant in the history of this country, Andrés Carne de Res, this entrepreneur, opened a new chapter in his life with the city’s Andrés D.C in 2010. Entering through the wooden doors of ‘Andrés D.C.’ one faces a large, leather-bound edition of Dante Aligheri’s The Divine Comedy. On an open page: “ Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The idea of staying sober seems clear in medieval text. On the main floor of this towering four-story restaurant – “Inferno” – celebrating takes on an epic proportion. The road to ‘D.C.’ was more a comedy of errors than a master plan for Andrés Jaramillo. As the son of a psychiatrist who worked with problem children, immersed in traumas and who needed around the clock care, the Jaramillo home was one of grounded values. Yet, a nearby mental asylum, in Chapinero, and where his father worked, gave plenty to talk about over the kitchen table. Case studies in madness and Jungian theories on analysis became part of the young Andrés’ daily diet. It seemed all too real, growing up in a conservative Bogotá of the sixties, to be slightly crazy. “I became attentive to the hidden meaning in symbols,” says Andres, sipping black coffee on the open-roof terrace of his Heaven – “Paradiso.” And symbols were motivational. They also held power of attraction. In the case of Andrés Carne de Res, this translates into more than a quarter of a million visitors each year. Behind the crazy aesthetics that exemplify his Chia-based restaurant, there is a keen businessman with a watchful eye. An obsessive attention to detail; from the way the plates are set, to the angle of the napkins with his initials embroidered on them, his name is everywhere and means everything to the customer. It’s a seal of approval. Starting with forty tables and a grill more than two decades ago, Andrés Carne de Res has grown into a behemoth of dining. He employs hundreds of cooks, thousands of waiters from Bogotá Universities who depend on him for work, paying their tuitions, craftsmen and women from around the country who supply his restaurants with hand-painted objects and utensils. There is a knick-knack for every moment and thousands of mementos to madness. Bogotá in the sixties was a very livable place. Quaint neighborhoods extended north from Chapinero and the Carrera 15, in Chicó, was the city’s ‘Fifth Avenue.’ It was in this protected world of conservative values that Andres found himself, wandering the streets in curiosity from school and where at night, his father would tune in on shortwave to HJCK while Fidel Castro spoke and news beamed in from Havana. But it was Bogotá’s buses that really ignited this young man’s imagination. Buses housed a particular “universe” for they represented a cultural clash between kitsch and sophistication. It was an experience to ride the bus and more than signifying that one was going places, it was a metaphor of an expanding city, with endless possibilities and destinations. Today, Andrés has recreated his glowing “bus” in Andres D.C, and inside the El Retiro shopping center. Everyday, thousands are transported into a world of sensations and a genuine ‘Colombia’ experience. After a family crisis erupted when Andres sawed-off the legs of the kitchen table to “reinvent” the family music box, a career in electrical engineering seemed secured. Yet fiddling with cables didn’t seem to light up Jaramillo’s ambitions, and although he excelled in his studies, there was a hidden objective in heading off to University: “I wanted to meet women. That was my big secret.” As a student of architecture, first at La Javeriana, and then Philosophy and Economics at La Nacional, Andrés Jaramillo, found himself restless and “endured” four semestres of higher education. Although he considers it one of the most beautiful periods in his life, he seemed to want more, deciding to drop out on several occasions, and look for the means of starting his own business. His first idea came organically, how to serve the pretty girls of Bogotá, snacks and then meet them. Into this world of “black and white,” as he calls it – color television being still a novelty in the 70s– and where social stratification was soldered together like the ironwork in his restaurants, Jaramillo, decided to add color to his existential life. “I was tired of thinking. I was in a crisis.” Months of planning and looking for the right location resulted in Andrés opening up a tienda next to an all-girls academy run by the socialite Victoria Bossio. The venture didn’t last long and a quarrel over a padlock forced the four table diner to shut down. The hard work and originality of his idea, did show Andrés that typical Colombian food and pretty girls were a good combination. Despite trying to graduate three times in this youth, Andrés did eventually get his degree, one in ‘Creative Business’ from La Nacional, when Andrés Carne de Res grew and evolved into multi-million dollar business. With the snack experiment for the twenty-something Jaramillo in shambles, the road ahead lay uncertain. All that was required for him was to pave his own destiny. With the help of an uncle, Andres Jaramillo, got into bulldozers. Selling heavy machinery for Fiat Allis opened up Colombia to this ambitious young man and the prospect of consolidating a friendship with Maria Stella, an elegant young woman he met on a bus, chased down a street and would later become his wife, the mother of his children and co-partner in Andrés. “I made my destiny by changing it,” recalls Jaramillo. Bulldozers gave way to banana groves and in 1980, Andrés, with a contract from Uniban, went to the Colombian Urabá to oversee agricultural and welfare programs for the organization. Despite the short-term contract, Andrés, learned valuable lessons on social responsibility, worker’s rights and the importance of investing in people. “I saw a lot of injustice. I realized that as a country, we are nothing unless we put people first.” An unpleasant incident involving three policemen on the beach in Cartagena changed the course of Andrés’s life and to a great extent, Colombian restaurant culture. On his way to Nicaragua to join the FMLN, Andrés still separated from Maria Stella and “madly in love” was frisked on a beach and almost thrown into jail for his hippie looks. It was a bad moment for his revolutionary ideals, and he decided to abandon the struggle for Central America for a life on the outskirts of Bogotá, Chia. “I wanted a cabin with flowers.” With these words, Andrés Jaramillo, describes how his wish to start a restaurant in the verdant fields of Cundinamarca began to materialize. Calling on an old friend Andrés Pernod, Andrés Jaramillo went into business. Without much debate over whose name to put first on the door, the two Andres’ decided that meat was the house speciality. But the name had to rhyme. One neighbor nearby went by “Teresa, Carne y Cerveza” and another “Agusto Carne a Su Gusto.” It seemed to good to be true. “The establishment had to be called ‘Andrés Carne de Res,’ calls Jaramillo. A fairytale start turned into a struggle. “We didn’t have light or a telephone”. But word soon got out that there was something magical happening under a tin roof in Chia. An ecclectic ambience, fueled by Andres’s passion for music, a roaring stone oven, grilled tenderloin brought in the first customers. The first object to adorn his restaurant: the reassembled parts of the vintage Radiola, Andrés had dismembered years ago in his family’s home. Hard-work became history in the making. Celebrities, CEOs and common folk began making the pilgrimage to Chia on weekends. Andrés Jaramillo and his “carne de res” became the obligatory place to celebrate anniversaries, weddings and the arrival of friends visiting Colombia. The restaurant grew and more objects started filling up the few remaining empty spaces of his wacky shanty. The experience of heading out of town to the cow pastures of Chia became known as “Andresear.” But there was something more sublime behind the success of Andrés. Colombian culture, with its religious iconography, regional foods and fruits, music and buseta-inspired pop culture, had been shunned for decades as being beneath the standards that existed elsewhere. Against this backdrop of “arribismo” – snobbery and social climbing – Andrés turned the tables. By rescuing the symbols of some inherent shame, he restored pride in what it means to be Colombian. “It isn’t a place of vanity” claims Andrés. “It’s a place of happiness.” Andrés Carne de Res and Andrés D.C., are not only case studies in business management, but of country-building. Every day thousands of foreigners visit his restaurants to revel in the some of the madness and magic that makes this country. For most outsiders a trip to “Andrés” is an obligatory stop on the travel map; then the “experience” hits home, often thousands of miles away, of what it was like to taste an uchava, drink aguardiente from a clay pot and dance on tables to vallenato. Andrés Jaramillo brought back to life so much more than the thousands of broken objects that adorn his restaurants: he restored a sense of hope in a country that a times, seemed beyond repair. Success hasn’t shaken or stirred his values though. Behind the gimmicks and gadgets that drive his businesses, he likes to see himself as the “boy who broke the Radiola.”

“Andrés tonight?” That's the question on the tongue of every Bogotá local and in-the-know visitor. Located in Chía, a 45-minute car ride from central Bogotá, Andrés Carne de Res is a sprawling 2.76 square mile restaurant that encompasses 11 dining areas, two dance floors, more than five kitchens, and a climbing wall. It draws hundreds, if not thousands, of people a night. "You drive 45 minutes outside of the city and you are thinking, What kind of restaurant is this?" says chef David Myers, of LA's Hinoki & The Bird and Comme Ça in Las Vegas. "It is really out in the country, a single-lane road leads there. Then you see this long line of cars and everybody is going to this restaurant, I mean everybody. The party from Bogota has moved outside the city to the country; it is the place to go. Enter the Andres experience through the Comedor de la Entrada, where everyone from the president of Colombia to Shakira to the Red Hot Chili Peppers has dined. The restaurant started back in 1982, when Andrés Jaramillo opened a roadside grill with just ten tables. Eat seafood bar-side and choose from nine types of ceviche, prepared Ecuadorian- Peruvian- or Caribbean-style. The restaurant's menu is 64 pages long. With eleven dining areas, not including seating in various nooks and crannies, the restaurant can seat 2,000 people, and can accommodate 3,300 in total. “All of their grilled steak was phenomenal,” raves Chef Myers. Diners can see into the open kitchen where chefs grill select meats marinated with Colombian beer.

What’s the vibe? Alice-in-Wonderland meets Moulin Rouge, Andrés Carne de Res is a mind-boggling trip of bright lights, theatrical service and colourful ceramic cows. A party place like no other, the dining room extends into an indoor and outdoor discotheque for late-night revellers … a must for any hedonist. On the menu: With a line-up featuring everything from Argentine steak and grilled provolone cheese to Peruvian ceviche and pisco sours, you might need an hour to decide your order. Sample some traditional Colombian patacones (crispy fried plantain) while you sift through the 64-page tome. How to get a table: Fill in the reservation form on Andrés’s website and you’ll be given on a spot on the waiting list. But the restaurant is so huge – it fits “half the world,” according to chef Andrés Jaramillo – you should have no trouble getting a table. Worth the trek? With the restaurant located an hour’s taxi ride outside Bogotá through some deserted neighbourhoods, it’s tempting to visit the smaller, local branch of Andrés in the capital. But it’s well-worth holding out for the flagship: everything is bigger and better and locals and tourists flock here en masse for the unique experience.