At Selva in Long Beach, feast on Colombian hot dogs and the mighty bandeja paisa

Whenever Long Beach chef Carlos Jurado visits Colombia, where he was born, he winds up feeling pulled to the hot dog stands set up along well-trafficked streets in cities across the country.

Over the last century, culinary cultures across South America have adapted the hot dog and made it their own. Its form is infinitely customizable to regional tastes.

As with the Chilean completo Italiano — a national favorite in which the frank disappears underneath flag-like stripes of chopped tomato, mashed avocado and rivers of mayo — Colombians tend to enjoy their hot dogs, called super-perros, with toppings as layered as geological strata. Jurado recalls them smothered in chopped bacon, Cheetos, onions and several sauces overlapping in squeeze-bottle squiggles. Crushed pineapple and fried quail eggs are frequent grace notes.

At first glance, the shape of the super-perro Jurado constructs at his 4-month-old restaurant Selva in Long Beach calls to mind an enormous mouth stuffed with potato chips. I don’t mean for that to sound unappetizing. In its rollicking excess, it’s a sight that fairly dares you to bite back.

Jurado swaps in a tapered bolillo roll for the usual oblong bun. A link of taut, paprika-stained Colombian chorizo peeks out from underneath 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, the smashed Lay’s chips dusted with chile powder.

This is, as you might imagine, a two-handed, face-planting commitment to polish off. The joyride of whirling textures and outsize flavors merits the small pile of napkins you’ll need afterward.

The hot dog is a staple among the restaurant’s weekend brunch items; at dinner, it can be requested as an off-the-menu special you have to know to ask for. It probably should stay that way. Eye-candy dishes, especially when they deliver beyond their visual pop as this one does, have a way of overrunning a kitchen with their popularity — and Selva has plenty of other exemplars of Colombian cuisine that are equally worth ordering.

This is Jurado’s first restaurant, although he’s a veteran of Los Angeles restaurants, including stints at Border Grill, Vespertine and the now-closed Red Medicine and Bouchon in Beverly Hills. In the last few years, he’d drifted toward restaurant consulting and recipe development. The change brought less stress and more time to focus on being a father.

He might have stayed on that path if he hadn’t received a call from restaurateurs Geoff and Karna Rau. He’d communicated with the couple before about other possible projects, but they’d recently closed the Hideaway, their Long Beach steakhouse, and they wondered whether he might like to see the building.

Jurado had occasionally held elaborate pop-up tasting-menu dinners, often centered on smoked meats. Hideaway’s 85-seat space, divided into a sedate dining room and a bar area with a view into the kitchen, felt like a place of possibility. Not for the fancy concoctions like smoked beef with fried wild rice and chlorophyll oil he’d tinkered with at the one-off meals but more for the straightforward cooking he’d come to love growing up.