Celele

Since 2018 at the Cartagena pass

At the pass, Jaime David Rodríguez Camacho keeps Celele in Cartagena close to the Colombian Caribbean, working as chef through ingredients that arrive with their own weather, language, and use. His station at Celele began in 2018, alongside the broader work of Caribe Lab, the project he founded to study the region’s cooking cultures and ecosystems. The restaurant’s method comes from a three-year journey through the Colombian Caribbean with collaborator Sebastian, gathering popular recipes, ancestral techniques, and underused ingredients before turning them into a contemporary kitchen practice in Getsemaní.

Rodríguez Camacho’s lineage here is not framed through a named school or mentor. It sits in fieldwork, supplier relationships, and the discipline of translating coastal knowledge without sanding away its local grain. The kitchen works with Afro-Caribbean roots, indigenous foodways, and the biodiversity around Cartagena rather than treating them as decoration. Celele’s own name carries that closeness: in champeta, it connects to “La Celele”; in Barranquilla, it suggests force of character; in the Caribbean savannah, it points to a salty pork broth, the memory behind Celele de cerdo.

Wild fruit, pork broth, flower salad

The program at Celele is built around Contemporary Caribbean cuisine, with roughly 90% of products from the Caribbean and 70% described as wild-harvested. The pantry names matter: orejero worked into sweet paste, guaimaro, pomarrosa, jumbalee, pickled cashews, Caribbean beans, yam, coconut, plantain, local crab. The kitchen uses dehydrations, fermentations, broth reductions, and controlled cooking to hold flavor in place while changing its form.

Celele de cerdo carries the house argument in one dish: pork confit terrine, banana purée, pickled sweet peppers, crunchy fried Caribbean beans, fresh cabbage, and pork broth. The Caribbean flower salad moves differently, with petals, passion fruit dressing, and pickled cashews. Crab with arepa ties the San Bernardo Archipelago to arepa samaria, while mussel broth, plantain dumplings, coconut béchamel, long-fermented beans, and sesame Creole broth appear elsewhere in the kitchen’s grammar.

Champeta in the room

The room in Getsemaní stays small, colorful, and informal enough that the service can speak at bench-side pace. Staff describe ingredients and dishes as they land, not as a script detached from the plate. Champeta gives the room its pulse; the cooking gives it weight. The counterpoint is deliberate: a restaurant carrying international attention, including The Best Terroir Award in 2024, works from a relaxed dining room rather than a sealed temple of ceremony.

The mood suits the food. Flower petals, pork broth, crab, arepa, and wild fruit arrive inside an artsy room that still feels close to the neighborhood outside the door. Conversation stays part of the texture, with professional service that does not stiffen the table. When the meal narrows to one bowl, Celele de cerdo brings the house back to its name, its broth, and Jaime David Rodríguez Camacho’s Caribbean bench.