The Chilean Mystique: Why Chile Is South America’s Next Food Frontier

“We need to cook what [we] are” exclaims Patricio Cáceres Pérez, owner of Motemei, a culinary workshop in the Vitacura section of Chile’s capital city of Santiago. A national gastronomic culture is coming into its own after Roldofo Guzmán, the wunderkind chef who founded Boragó ten years ago, inspired his contemporaries to rediscover Chile’s endemic animals and plants and explore old recipes and to use ingredients in innovative ways. (The most recent “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” survey came out earlier this month and Boragó, located in Vitacura as well, ranked number 42.)

Related: 10 Tasty Chilean Recipes to Try Now

Cáceres Pérez wants chefs and diners alike to focus on fundamentals and appreciate the natural bounty of Chile’s soil, lakes, rivers and the Pacific Ocean. Located on three continents – South America, Antarctica, and Oceania – Chile is home to a diverse range of landscapes. In fact, there is no one “best” time to visit the country since the climates are so distinct. Spring and fall may allow visitors to experience pleasant weather in Santiago, for instance, and fewer crowds in national parks, but locals say that trips can be planned at any time as long as the traveler researches the destination and knows what type of weather is typical for the location when he or she plans to go there. [pagebreak]

Cáceres Pérez mentions that “Chileans always wanted to be French or English,” but that many indigenous groups are becoming proud of their contributions in terms of food and in other areas, and that the emphasis on seeing European ideas as innately better than local ones, is fading. He adds that “lots of lemon, onions,” certain types of spices including “oregano and merkén,” are all essential aspects of “Chilean” food.

Vegetables native to Chile include hundreds of types of potatoes – European potatoes originated in South America – and wild berries such as “murta,” which is found mostly in Patagonia and used in many traditional recipes and in at least one alcoholic drink. The nalca plant, used by native peoples thousands of years ago in curantos – shellfish and meat feasts that were cooked in pits in the ground – continues to be used today since the curanto tradition lives on. Cochayuyo, a type of kelp that is found in the ocean, has longed been used in meals and by parents to soothe the gums of teething babies.

Marine life is abundant along Chile’s coast due to the Humboldt Current, a low-salinity current that runs from south to north along the country’s more than three thousand kilometers of coastline. Chile’s waters are home to conger eels, huge barnacles called picorocos, and large mussels. In fact, Pablo Neruda wrote a famous ode to “conger chowder” and said that this dish contained the “soul” of Chile. Finally, Chile is home to a salmon industry that exports more salmon than any other country except for Norway. [pagebreak]

Rabbit with pickles and boar with mashed potatoes, rustic dishes with “touches of softness,” are perhaps a middle ground between Boragó’s experimental flair and Cáceres Pérez’s commitment to ingredients without the emphasis on beauty. (The owner of Motemei, who trained as an engineer before turning to cooking, quips that one should go to a museum to see art, but that a meal should “nourish the soul.”)

These rabbit and boar dishes were just two of the items on the menu that Mauricio Ayala served at his ten-table restaurant on Chiloé Island, one Monday evening in March. Diners at Cazador, his restaurant that is located in a 100-year-old stilt house on Chiloé, off of Chile’s southern coast, should come away from the meal “feeling the forest,” according to Ayala. Ninety-nine percent of the ingredients on the menu at Cazador come from the island itself and dessert, in fact, included a panel from which honey could be scraped off of the honeycomb and added to fresh yogurt. 

Chile’s top chef according to Wikén magazine, a prestigious publication in South American gastronomic circles, Rolando Ortega, agrees that focusing on ingredients is critical and his restaurant in the center of Santiago, Salvador Cocina y Café, is a place where office workers come three to four times a week for comfort food. Ortega and his team have been creating Chilean dishes for five years and he says that the present time is a “great moment for Chilean food.” He agrees with Cáceres Pérez that the meal itself should truly nourish a person and that aesthetic elements should be secondary. Ortega also adds that if the Chilean food boom is, in fact, a fad, the restaurants that serve the highest-quality food will stand the test of time. [pagebreak]

Chile’s culinary history stretches back to the initial indigenous inhabitants of the region and one group, the Mapuche, introduced spices such as previously-mentioned merkén, pulverized red chile peppers, into the diets of the Spanish, German, and Croatian immigrants who became part of the country’s population in large numbers. For most of the past, French cuisine was considered the highest form of gastronomy and Chilean chefs looked to Europe when establishing restaurants in Santiago or elsewhere.

This has changed, according to Alvaro Romero, a Santiago-based chef who will open a new restaurant in September of this year and who gained critical recognition while at Europeo, also located in the Vitacura neighborhood. Romero says that Rodolfo Guzmán, the chef who opened Boragó, has become an ambassador for Chilean cuisine and concurs that Chile’s soil and extensive coastline are what make its products so special.

Paula Calquin, a chef who is currently working at a luxury lodge called Tierra Patagonia, next to Torres Del Paine National Park, says that the distinct regions – the extreme south, the south, the central region and the north – are so different that food culture developed in unique ways in each one. The lamb of Patagonia, in her opinion, has a special taste that is unlike lamb that comes from other territories, for example. [pagebreak]

Santiago-based chef, Christian Hayes, states that a person who visits Chile “must eat fish,” while Rolando Ortega, the expert at designing dishes that use all parts of the pig, stresses that meat is an important element of Chilean cuisine.

If possible, a visitor should try to eat both – Chilean chefs in 2017 have embraced the challenge of cooking with what is “theirs.” These chefs have succeeded in making Chilean food fashionable within their own country and have attracted outsiders to their tables, enabling diners to “trip[s] in time,” according to Rolando Ortega, with their creations. (Ortega, in fact, interviewed older residents living in nursing homes about recipes from their childhoods in order to research and preserve how dishes had been prepared in the past.)

Those who work with food in the top restaurants as well as in more modest establishments, have become conscious of the bounty that nature has provided them with and develop dishes that they feel represent the “soul” of the country. Whether “conger chowder” has been replaced by any of the new Chilean concoctions is up to the diner to decide – a visitor to Chile can sample Neruda’s beloved soup in a variety of settings – and try previously unheard of pairings of ingredients as well.

These days, Chile’s cuisine is being celebrated and what constitutes the country’s gastronomic culture is ever-evolving as experts and amateurs endeavor to understand their ancestors’ eating habits and how to redefine the country’s “food” future!