Catch SF’s best Colombian restaurant — and its secret menu — while you can 

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Colombian food can be tough to find in San Francisco. Sure, there are excellent Caribbean and pan-Latin restaurants — Chao Pescao and Mr. Pollo among them — but apart from the occasional food truck, few places specialize in the cuisine of South America’s northwesternmost nation.

But at Pacifico, a long-term pop-up at Hayes Valley’s B-Side — which is, in turn, inside the SFJAZZ Center — diners can load up on ceviche, arepas, and plenty of grilled meat. A project by husband-and-wife team (and La Cocina alumni) Daniel Morales Vallejo and Laura Gelvez, Pacifico leapt from a stand behind the Ferry Building for a year-long residency meant to attract two distinct crowds: weekday office workers and weekend bohemians.

If you’re among the Monday-to-Friday crowd, the most intriguing item may be the rotating Corrientazo Pacifico, or “Colombian executive lunch,” aimed at providing a well-rounded meal to diners who can’t dawdle. A steal at $20, it’s a meat-and-four that, on my visit, consisted of grilled beef topped with tangy ají sauce, well-salted fries to mop up the juices, slow-cooked beans with a few slices of plantain, a scoop of white rice, and a simple salad. 

More overtly tropical alternatives are easy to find, like the $24 Bowl Pacifico, a melange of seared shrimp with coconut rice, plantains, herbs, and greens, and a $22 halibut ceviche prepared with rocoto pepper leche de tigre.

Brunch may be even more fun. The $28 calentao, a flavorful pork-and-plantain rice bowl topped with a fried egg, is basically the executive lunch with a hangover, while the ceviche options broaden to include fried calamari as well as shrimp. Served in an understated Nick and Nora glass and garnished with a mere fragment of lime, a $17 coconut-milk-washed daiquiri has an unctuous texture. At 11 a.m., it may be the silkiest hair of the most well-behaved dog.

Many chefs are said to loathe brunch. But Morales has sympathy for the morning-after crowd, describing the beef broth in the caldo de costilla as an “elixir of short rib” designed to bring people back to life after partying the night before. There’s even a secret menu for those hungering for more adventurous forays into the world of Colombian seafood that includes a Cartagena-style whole fried fish with house-made coconut shrimp sauce — but if you want to know the other secrets, you’ll have to discover them for yourself.

In the strictest sense, Pacifico isn’t entirely Colombian. Prior to his tenure at The Progress and both the Embarcadero and Miami locations of La Mar, Morales spent three years in Peru, and the restaurant’s name refers to the coasts of those two countries, plus California’s. Beyond the ceviches, Peru makes its presence felt in the $5 chicha morada, a sweetened corn beverage that’s ubiquitous there. Detours into American fare retain a distinctly hybrid vibe, like steak frites with anticuchera sauce.

Pacifico’s biggest downside may be the muted decor. B-Side occupies a space on SFJAZZ’s ground floor that’s sunny enough but almost deliberately placeless, the temporary home of fledgling businesses like Pacifico and, before it, Victoria Lozano’s Venezuelan pop-up Andina. Apart from the wall-mounted flatscreen TVs cycling through advertisements for the venue’s musical programming, the poured concrete and floor-to-ceiling windows could be found anywhere. 

Less than a year from now, Pacifico will have run its course. Though Morales and Gelvez say there’s an option to renew, if the business thrives, they’ll likely set out on their own. In the meantime, what they’re doing cannot be found anywhere else.

Eat Here Now is a first look at some of the newest, hottest restaurants around — the ones we think are worth visiting. We dine once, serve forth our thoughts, and let you take it from there.