Cobaya del Cielo with Chef Juan Manuel Barientos

There are few places in the United States where you can have as varied a sampling of Latin American flavors as in Miami. And yet there are only a handful of such restaurants here that strive to operate on the higher end of the dining spectrum. Decades ago Douglas Rodriguez did it with Yuca and then Ola, and more recently, Gaston Acurio's branch of La Mar in Brickell raises the bar for Peruvian food. But these types of places are still the exceptions.

Add El Cielo to the mix. Its chef is Juan Manuel Barrientos, a 31-year old who looks like he could be half that age, but whose flagship in Bogotá, Colombia has already been recognized in the S. Pellegrino "Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants" list. His ambitious tasting menus mix traditional Colombian ingredients with modernist methods and dramatic presentations. Earlier this year, he opened another iteration here in Miami, which a couple weeks ago played host to our 57th "Cobaya" dinner.

Here's how it went:

(You can see all my pictures in this Cobaya del Cielo flickr set).

After a bit of a head fake to start (we had our guinea pigs meet at a small café around the corner from the restaurant's location inside the Brickell on the River condo, where they were given a little snack for the walk over), we had cocktails out on the patio before being led inside to the dining room.

Things get kind of weird quickly. The meal starts with what Chef "JuanMa" calls "chocotherapy": liquid chocolate that is poured over the diners' hands, meant to be rubbed into one's skin and then licked off. It's messy, it's goofy, but it also gets everybody laughing and it smells great too.

That's followed by another cocktail, a "mistela" of aguardiente and passion fruit (which would probably have been better if served colder) and a snack he called "Follow the Stars" made up of a crisp sheet of nori topped with toasted sesame seeds, citrus curd and candied slivers of carambola (a/k/a star fruit). This uncannily reminded me of a snack I'd had five years ago at El Bulli, a nori cracker filled with tart lemon and sesame.

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P.I.G. 6 [Pork Is Good] - a celebration of all things pig orchestrated by Chef Jeremiah

I'm not usually a big fan of the typical food events where a bunch of restaurants set up stations and everyone lines up to taste a bunch of tepid – usually boring – bites. "P.I.G." (i.e., "Pork Is Good"), which Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog of the gastroPod has now orchestrated for six years running, defies those generally low expectations. In fact, it's one of my favorite Miami food events of the year.

This all started back in 2009 when Jeremiah rounded up a small group of people at Harvey's by the Bay (a bar in an American Legion outpost which backs on to Biscayne Bay) and served them some chicharrones, smoked pork butt char siu bao, and a whole pig rolled porchetta style and roasted in a caja china (all the pics here; you can also see pics from P.I.G. #2, P.I.G. #4, and P.I.G. #5 – I clearly didn't read the Book of Armaments for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch since I missed #3).

In the years since then, he's made it a collaborative thing, rounding up some of the best chefs in town and some from more far-flung locales, all to riff like on the theme of pig like some culinary supergroup. This year featured some of my favorite folks: Roel Alcudia (now consulting at Fooq's), Aaron Brooks from Edge, Will Crandall from Izzy's, Todd Erickson from Haven, Kurtis Jantz of the Trump Miami, Bradley Kilgore from Alter, Brian Mullins from Ms. Cheezious, Mike Pirolo from Macchialina and Bazi, Patrick Rebholz from Quality Meats, Steve Santana from Taquiza, and James Strine from Café Boulud in Palm Beach, plus special appearances by charcuterie wizards Craig Deihl from Charleston's Cypress and Kyle Foster (Colt & Gray and Rebel in Denver, and formerly Talula here in Miami), plus desserts from Josh Gripper of The Dutch and Giselle Pinto from Sugar Yummy Mama.

Somehow, this event just has good karma: the weather always holds up, there's always a crowd but it never feels crowded, there's no lineups with everyone elbowing each other to get to the food, the drinks flow freely, the chefs all bring their "A" game, and everyone has a good time. In more than three hours I still didn't make my way around to try everything, but here are some highlights (you can see all my pictures in this P.I.G. 6 flickr set):

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best thing i ate last week: "Amazon's Tree of Life" at Cobaya del Cielo

It was a runner-up a few months when I first tried it; it will get top billing this week. Juan Manuel Barrientos is the chef of El Cielo, a highly regarded restaurant in Colombia which last year opened a branch in Miami. JuanMa's creative, theatrical style fit well with our Cobaya thing, so we asked him to host a dinner for us.

We usually ask chefs to go completely off-menu, but I can understand why he'd include a staple from the restaurant, which he calls "Amazon's Tree of Life." Visually it's a stunner: an undulating copper frame mounted to a stone, supporting a flatbread whose surface is pocked with bubbles, almost perfectly duplicating the appearance of a baobab tree. And it's delicious too, the chewy, crusty, cheesy bread meant to be torn and dipped into a a bowl with a creamy coconut sauce dusted on top with a black squid ink powder. It was the best thing I ate last week.

(You can see all the pictures from the dinner in this Cobaya del Cielo flickr set).