Costenisimo serves hot dogs, desgranado loaded fries and burgers beside a car wash in St Kilda East

If Colombian snacks aren’t part of your summer plan, you’re not doing it right. And not just the snacks: the vibe. Costenisimo is a carwash cafe that turns into a cruisy, low-key hangout in the late afternoon and evening.

Friends sit outside on the fake lawn, wrapping their jaws around overstuffed hot dogs. Families come in for burgers and fake-fruity soft drinks. Romance blooms over cartons of messy loaded fries. Dogs wait hopefully for sausage spillage.

It might seem a stretch to compare a traffic-clogged corner across the road from a cemetery, to a lazy, sunshiney snack session in the Caribbean. But Costenisimo is named for “Costenos”, the inhabitants of Colombia’s coastal north that spills down to the Caribbean Sea. Costenos are renowned for being friendly, informal and ready for joy, and you feel that here, even though it’s an order-at-the-counter place with cardboard plates and bamboo cutlery.

Owner Roberto Acero is from the region’s city of Valledupar, where he has a grill restaurant. At his new Melbourne eatery, it’s more about affordable carb-loading. He and his girlfriend launched the business from their home a year ago, mostly delivering to friends. They progressed to a food truck in Sunshine before setting up southside in spring. It’s a testament to the care and quality of the food that many Colombians from the west now beeline for St Kilda.

Most of them are coming for desgranado, the lavishly loaded fries typical to Colombia’s Caribbean cuisine. Just as gold may be buried kilometres deep within a mine, the chips are concealed somewhere way down there, but it’s worth the dig past house-made garlic and mayo sauce, corn kernels, tiny shoestring crisps, shredded lettuce, barbecued chicken, sliced sausage and shredded mozzarella.

You expect beef patties in a brioche burger; this one amps up with grilled chicken and bacon and is chat-stoppingly good.

Hot dogs are a Colombian street food essential. The Perro Salvaje (“wild do”) is stuffed with Kransky sausage – a Melbourne invention – but channels Valledupar with the addition of chicken, bacon, soft onions and more excellent house sauce.

If you’re Colombian, you’ll already have opinions about the Melbourne restaurants doing this food. To pick out a couple of places, Perreo is popular for its multiregional spin around the country’s treasures and StreetDogz has people queuing for its fusion hot dogs.

I’m a fan of those places, too, but I am truly enamoured of Costenisimo for its honest flavours, generous but judicious hand with their tart house sauce and – when the crowds descend – the cheery urban jostle of its outdoor seating.