Selva

"Long Beach Colombian $$ Reservation Carlos Jurado — a veteran chef of Los Angeles restaurants, including stints at Vespertine and Border Grill — had drifted toward consulting and recipe development before partnering with restaurateurs Geoff and Karna Rau. In leading his first kitchen, Jurado returns to foods he’d loved growing up; his parents relocated from Colombia to Long Beach when he was 3, and he started making regular trips to see family in South America when he was a teenager. The quickest route to happiness at Selva is via the bandeja paisa, a one-platter feast synonymous with Colombia. Thick, ruddy slices of steak fan across one edge of the plate. A spiral of other meats and sides — grilled chorizo or morcilla, extra-crisp hunks of pork belly, golden lobes of plantain, smoky beans, white rice, a griddled arepa filled with corn and queso, a fried egg, sliced avocado — ends with a tuft of pickled onions arranged in the center like a bull’s-eye. Colombians tend to enjoy their hot dogs, called super-perros, with toppings as layered as geological strata. For Jurado’s joyride version, a link of taut, paprika-stained Colombian chorizo peeks out from beneath a topsoil of crumbled cotija, charred onions and peppers, jalapeño jam, aioli mixed with salsa verde (a mulchy, punchy Colombian version called ají) and, finally, smashed Lay’s chips dusted with chile powder. This is, as you might imagine, a two-handed, face-planting commitment to polish off."