Chile – The South American capital is famous around the world for its wine, but until recently its food wasn’t known beyond its long borders. Now, several chefs in Chile are revolutionising Chilean cuisine.
While some chefs are reawakening the ancestral dishes of the indigenous Mapuche and Rapa Nui, others are reimagining typical fare by experimenting with Chilean ingredients, including edible flowers from places such as Patagonia and the snow peaks of the Andes.
Foodies from around the world are travelling in increasing numbers to Santiago to sample a half-dozen high-end restaurants. Typical Chilean foods include empanadas, shellfish soups and maize casseroles and are not spicy.
“We’ve developed in our kitchens all these foods that the Mapuche had been eating for hundreds of years,” said chef Rodolfo Guzman, whose Borago restaurant has been named in the Latin American section of San Pellegrino’s World’s 50 Best Restaurants list.
Guzman opened Borago in 2007 after working in Spain’s Basque country at Mugaritz, one of the world’s top restaurants. Several sous chefs who worked at Borago have opened their own places.
“Chile finally stopped looking outside and began looking at itself,” said Chilean food journalist Daniel Greve. “It’s a revolution of looking at your roots, at the indigenous, at what’s interesting about our mom and grandma’s cooking and wanting to recreate a landscape, an entire country.”
At the restaurant Peumayen, chef Juan Manuel Pena serves bite-sized breads arranged geographically from Chile’s north to south. They include poe, a plantain cake from the Rapa Nui, the inhabitants of Easter Island, the remote South Pacific territory Chile annexed in 1888. The exotic breads are followed by appetisers, including hen with an onion purée, mushrooms and strawberries, horse meat, and bass with a seaweed salad in white wine.
“A few years back we were still arguing about what makes a Chilean flavour, what is Chilean gastronomy?” said Pena, an Argentinian who moved to Chile 10 years ago. “We took a step forward.”
At Carlo Cocina Mercado Gourmet, that has meant reinventing how traditional staples are served, such as arranging bits of ceviche or a little “tomatican” – a sauté of tomato, maize and onion – in individual portions. The gourmet market-style restaurant also sells Chilean products, such as bottled water from Patagonia and olives from the Atacama desert.
“Chile is taking risks,” said Carlo Von Muhlenbrock, a Chilean chef who owns the restaurant and hosts a radio and TV show about the country’s cuisine.
Dishes at Borago include grilled conger eel dipped in a brown, soy-like tasting broth made from the roots of cochayuyo, a Chilean seaweed, and served alongside a purée cooked over a sea rock. A traditional stew known as a chupe, which uses seafood, in this case is made with forest mushrooms and decorated with thin leaves of wild plants.
“I didn’t know anything about Chilean cuisine, but I liked Borago so much that I ate there two nights in a row,” said Brandon Hensinger, 33, a foodie from Philadelphia who has a goal to try all of Latin America’s best restaurants.
Latin American cuisine has gained respect globally thanks to culinary maestros like Peru’s Gaston Acurio, who has opened more than 12 restaurants worldwide, including the Astrid & Gaston franchise.
The ingredients in the evolving dishes are as varied as Chile’s geography. They include fresh olives grown in some of the world’s driest deserts in the far north to merquen, a blend of smoked red chillies and coriander seeds native to the southern region of Araucania that the Mapuche claim as their ancestral territory.
While the chefs in Santiago are raising the profile of Chilean cuisine outside the country, they also need to promote their efforts at home, says Maria Canabal, a food writer in Paris.
“It’s an isolated phenomenon because most of the country’s restaurants are not haute cuisine or don’t offer indigenous products. I just hope (the phenomenon) inspires others to do the same.”
Sapa-AP