A Colombian chef has taken top honours at GastroAntep, a food festival in Gaziantep, Turkey, with a dish that tells the story of Colombia's Caribbean coast on a single plate. María Cecilia Restrepo, known online as Aja Chechi, beat out four other chefs — from Lebanon, Spain, Greece and Turkey, including a MasterChef Turkey winner — with a pairing of kibbeh and black corn arepas de huevo. She was the only woman in the line-up.
The dish was a tribute to the fried-food stalls you'll find all over Colombia's Caribbean coast, where vendors sell arepas de huevo, empanadas and carimañolas as everyday street food. Kibbeh, meanwhile, points to a lesser-known layer of the region's history: Middle Eastern immigrants, many of Syrian and Lebanese descent, settled on the coast and their cooking became part of local food culture. Restrepo's own background mirrors that mix — her maternal grandmother was Syrian and passed down family recipes that now shape her style.
She didn't leave anything to chance with ingredients. Restrepo carried the black corn dough for her arepas all the way from Colombia so the dish would taste like home. And there was a comic twist to the win: in a video she posted on social media, she explained she thought she was just doing a live cooking demonstration at the festival — not entering a competition — until she found herself facing off against other chefs. The 2026 edition of GastroAntep ran from 3 to 11 October in Gaziantep, a Turkish city famous for its food heritage and a regular meeting point for culinary professionals from around the world.
Restrepo runs a food venture in Cartagena and shares coastal Colombian recipes on social media, so if her story makes you hungry, that's where to look. For travellers, the takeaway is simple: the fried stalls of Barranquilla, Cartagena and Santa Marta deserve a proper food-crawl. An arepa de huevo — a corn arepa fried, split, filled with a whole egg and sealed — is one of the coast's signature snacks, and the kibbeh sold at coastal stalls is a delicious reminder of how far flavours travel.
Her win also puts a spotlight on Colombian Caribbean cuisine more broadly, a tradition that mixes Indigenous, African and Middle Eastern roots and remains far less famous internationally than it deserves. Food travellers planning a Colombia trip could do worse than build a few days around Cartagena's street stalls and coastal flavours.
