Bogotá chef Harry Sasson received the ultimate accolade as part of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants 2024: the Woodford Reserve Icon Award.
When Harry Sasson opened his first restaurant in Bogotá in 1995, he was keen to show off his learnings from five years working in Canada. He served everything from Asian ingredients to foie gras and risotto on the menu at H.Sasson Wok & Satay Bar.
“I was young, I wanted to show Colombians the flavours and skills I’d discovered,” Sasson said in his acceptance speech at the 12th annual Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants awards in Rio de Janeiro last month. “I was copying the culinary trends.”
Some years later, Sasson heard of a chef in Lima who was cooking Peruvian dishes with Peruvian ingredients. It was Gastón Acurio of Astrid y Gastón, which went on to claim the top spot in the inaugural Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2013.
Over the years, Sasson has become a father figure to younger chefs in the industry
“Gastón Acurio showed us the way forward: Latin American pride,” Sasson said in his speech. “As my colleague Jorge Rausch says, we must believe the story of our own traditional cuisines and proudly show them to the world.”
Championing Colombian cuisine
Now, 30 years later, Sasson does exactly that. After a decade and a half at its original location, H. Sasson Wok & Satay Bar became Harry Sasson, moving to a new location, where it has now been for almost 15 years. It still serves customer favourites like crispy duck and sweet and sour shrimp, and meat and seafood from the Japanese robata grill and the wood-fired oven, but there’s a greater focus on looking inward, with local ingredients like palm hearts, and traditional dishes like arepas.
“Customers would come from abroad and ask to try something Colombian, but there was nothing Colombian on the menu,” says the 55 year old. “Now we have so much Colombian gastronomy to offer.”
Not only that, but the quality of local produce has transformed, with Sasson’s restaurants now focusing on sourcing the best quality ingredients, like Amazonian honey or palm heart from Putumayo.
Sasson's cooking has evolved from being internationally focused to championing Colombian produce
It may have taken a while to settle on his style of cuisine, but Sasson’s path to cooking was clear. From a very young age, he always wanted to cook, so at 17 he embarked on his culinary studies in Bogotá. He trained at the Hilton hotel before being offered the opportunity to move to Canada, where he stayed for five years. Missing his family, he returned to Bogotá and opened his first restaurant at 26.
He went on to run seven restaurants, including Club Colombia, Harry’s Bar and Balzac, but it is the eponymous Harry Sasson, housed in a historic mock Tudor townhouse with a striking glass-and-steel extension at the rear, that cemented his reputation as Colombia’s culinary king. He now appears on TV shows and has shared his recipes in a weekly newspaper column for 27 years.
Giving back
While his star has risen over the decades, Sasson has turned his hand to the community, teaming up with his wife, Cristina Botero, on several social projects. The first of these is the Fundación Corazón Verde, where Botero was director for 14 years. The non-profit raises money for the widows and orphans of the police officers who were victims of Colombia’s armed conflict, through art and other projects, including the annual Alimentarte gastronomic festival.
While the couple are still involved with Corazón Verde, Botero stepped down as director in 2024 and they now dedicate themselves to Fundación Gastronomia Social. Running 40-hour ‘bootcamps’, they train people from underprivileged backgrounds to work as servers in their restaurants, improving their quality of life. They also run zero-waste and sustainability initiatives, teaching market traders to make use of fruits that would otherwise be thrown away by turning them into vinegars and marmalades.
Sasson and his wife, Cristina Botero, are involved in several social projects
Founded in Chile by fellow Icon Award winner Rafael Rincón, Gastronomia Social also includes Comida Para Todos, a network of soup kitchens and restaurants feeding those in need. Botero and Sasson are helping to extend the model into Colombia, providing hot meals to 1,600 children and young adults each month.
A new way of working
There have, of course, been plenty of challenges over the years – the biggest being the Covid-19 pandemic. During lockdown, all but two of Sasson’s restaurants had to permanently close, leaving just Harry Sasson in Bogotá and Harry’s Cartagena. Many of his staff learned new skills and decided not to return to hospitality.
“The pandemic changed our way of working, our way of thinking,” says Sasson. “Hospitality is tough. Cooks and servers are on their feet all day for long, stressful shifts. I wanted my staff to be able to spend weekends with their families, to work fewer hours.”
Now, instead of split shifts, staff work a morning or an afternoon, and Sasson has employed more people to ease the pressure. He is also prioritising his own family life, spending more time with Botero and their two children, aged nine and 12. “I worked so hard in the beginning. Now I want to see them grow up.”
Collaboration, not competition
A shared understanding of the trials and tribulations of kitchen life is one of the reasons why Sasson has embraced – and been embraced by – Latin America’s chef community. While he is now good friends with his Peruvian peer Gastón Acurio, he has also become a father figure to younger chefs across the region, and he sees the annual 50 Best events as a time to celebrate all they have achieved.
In 2025, Sasson will be celebrating 30 years of restaurant ownership
“Whether or not we are on the list, it’s a time to see each other and celebrate the brotherhood between chefs,” he says. “The life of a cook is not easy. We relate to each other and understand each other.”
Similarly, he supports collaboration over competition. “There shouldn’t be jealousy between chefs,” he says. “When I started at the Hilton, other cooks wouldn’t share their learnings because they felt threatened. Today, things are different. If another chef asks for the name of my providers, I tell them. If a customer asks for a recipe, I give it to them. It’s about being generous with your customers, your employees and your colleagues.”
Three decades of growth
While Sasson and Acurio’s restaurants once ranked high in Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants, now they have made way for those run by a new generation of chefs, like Virgilio Martinez and Pia León’s Central, Álvaro Clavijo’s El Chato and Leonor Espinosa’s Leo. He credits these chefs for continuing the evolution of the region’s local cuisines.
“Thirty years ago, there were no Colombian fine dining restaurants, just cafés and traditional restaurants,” he says. “Chefs like Álvaro Clavijo and Leonor Espinosa have taken Colombian cuisine to a higher level.”
On stage at Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants 2024 awards ceremony
Arguably, those chefs wouldn’t have got to where they are without Sasson paving the way. Modest, the chef says one of his proudest achievements is his longevity – which he partly puts down to learning what his customers want and giving it to them.
“For a restaurant to reach 30 years and still be full – obviously you have to evolve and transform – but when you know your own identity, you don’t copy others, you look inwards rather than at others, then you are happy for others and their achievements,” he says.
It is this generosity of spirit, dedication to his country’s cuisine and the community, coupled with the long-lasting success of his restaurants, that have helped Harry Sasson win the Woodford Reserve Icon Award 2024.
Discover the full list of Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants 2024
