A kitchen that tells the story of Colombia

When Camilo Murcci entered a kitchen for the first time, he felt that this was his place. It was the space where he could be himself and create without limits. Camilo, born in Envigado, ended up living in many cities in Colombia due to fate, but he had never felt at home in any of them. Camilo was born with a cleft palate, which meant that he was always treated differently and even discriminated against: “They even asked me if I could speak normally, but what is normal?”

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It was in the kitchen of a hotel in Bogotá that he felt he fit in. “When the chef spoke to me for the first time, he looked me in the eyes, not in the mouth, like everyone else.” And he knew that this was the world for him. “The first time I had to go out and explain a dish to a customer, I felt like I was in my element,” he recalls. “It was a chicken, the first dish I made alone, and they asked me to come to the table to congratulate me.”

From there, his journey through the kitchen has taken him to multiple places. Today he is behind Mhazoa restaurant that will soon open its doors in the Casa Victoria hotel, on the Inferior transversal with Loma de Los Parra. That place is, you could say, his dream come true. “I have always been interested in Colombian ingredients and techniques,” he explains. And that is why Mhazo It is a restaurant that offers a cuisine in which our country is the center; it is the protagonist.

“The restaurant is cuisine of origin; it is a proposal that tells everything that I experienced when I was young and small in regions of the country such as Huila, Guajira, the Eastern Plains, Boyacá and Bogotá,”

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He also tries to create local cuisine: create recipes with ingredients that are produced near Medellín, within a radius of 80 to 90 kilometers, “and let them shine.”

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Taste of Colombia

For him, Colombia is the center: “It is a wonderful place that is increasingly coming to light.” In fact, Camilo has been part of The Best Chef Awards since 2022. There he has had the opportunity to sit down with the greats of world gastronomy and learn from each of them.

But his curiosity does not stop. Each of his projects – he is also a chef at The Capachosin Villavicencio—has a research background, so much so that it created Biomapicuaa gastronomic laboratory where he investigates the relationship between sustainability and gastronomy, and where he develops each of the dishes that later arrive at the tables of his diners. There, in addition to ingredients, Camilo investigates their stories, everything that lies behind each ingredient that arrives in his pots and that he serves on their tables.

“The origin is more valuable than the dish. When one talks about the product, there is always a nice story behind it. We cannot forget that human beings love stories. The world is an open book for learning and for cooking.”

Camilo combines local ingredients and flavours with techniques from other latitudes and, without any reservations, creates dishes that speak of a biodiverse country, a country that excites and tastes delicious. And that, obviously, will be seen in Mhazo“We are creating a garden there in the spring. I talk about places like the eastern Antioquia region; there is a lot of proximity. In our surroundings there are many producers with whom we can connect.”

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