Leo

About Leo

Leo is the restaurant where Leonor Espinosa redrew the map of Colombian fine dining. Since 2021 it has occupied a townhouse at Calle 65bis #4-23 in the upmarket Chapinero district of Bogotá, where Espinosa cooks a tasting menu built entirely from the country's own ecosystems and her sommelier daughter, Laura Hernández-Espinosa, runs the pairings. Latin America's 50 Best ranked it No. 23 in 2025, and Espinosa herself was named The World's Best Female Chef in 2022. The full tasting starts around COP 580,000 per person. For the standards we judge it against, see our seven signs of a great restaurant.

The Kitchen

Leonor Espinosa is a self-taught chef who has become one of the most important figures in Colombian gastronomy, and Leo is the laboratory for her ideas. The menu follows a concept she calls Ciclo-Bioma — a journey through Colombia's biomes that draws on ingredients from the Amazon, the Páramo, the Pacific and the Caribbean, many of them little known outside the communities that harvest them.

A meal here is a sequence of small, exacting plates rather than a single signature dish: arawana, an Amazonian fish, served with sour cassava and a calf's-foot jelly under coquindo seed oil; dried shrimp with a crumb of crushed snails and ants; peach-palm heart with hormigas culonas, the big-bottomed ants of Santander. Ingredients like the mojojoy worm, borojó fruit and wild rodent appear as the cycle demands. The full Ciclo-Bioma tasting begins at about COP 580,000 per person, rising with the wine or the non-alcoholic botanical pairing Laura builds alongside it. The No. 23 placing in Latin America's 50 Best 2025 is the dated proof; the World's Best Female Chef title of 2022 is the wider context.

The Room

Leo spans two dining rooms under one roof: the ground floor showcasing Espinosa's cooking, and a second space overseen by Laura Hernández-Espinosa and her cellar. The townhouse setting in Chapinero is intimate and considered rather than grand — muted, warm, designed to keep the focus on the plates and the story behind each ingredient. This is a destination dinner: reservations are required and generally go weeks in advance, and the tasting unfolds over several hours, so plan the evening around it. Dress is smart; the room rewards the occasion.