Serving Up Santiago

Chile’s New Crop of Chefs

The following morning, I tell Caskey that I’ve been hearing a lot lately about a bunch of gifted Santiago chefs who are actually – gasp – cooking Chilean food. She confirms this as a recent phenomenon. “Twenty years ago, the focus was on Chilean home cooking prepared in a very simple manner,” she says over a cup of strong coffee at Café Haiti, just off the Plaza de Armas in the historic city centre. “These young chefs, often trained in Europe and elsewhere, continue that tradition,” she says, “but they now take the country’s fantastic ingredients and make very intense modern dishes.” 

1 Chileans are proud of their culinary traditions, showing them off on this poster gracing a Bellavista street. 2 Hungry folks flock to Galindo to fill up on golden congrio frito and caldillo de congrio, a hearty fish stew immortalized by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda.

She leads me to Bellavista, a bohemian neighbourhood full of small shops and old homes painted a landscape palette of viridian, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow and burnt sienna, for a taste of home cooking. At Galindo, we sit down at a dinged-up wooden table covered in a checkered burgundy tablecloth. Men in suits, young families and college students hurry in off the street and order steaming bowls of caldillo de congrio, a classic dish so beloved that the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to it. But I go for the congrio frito with a traditional salad of sliced tomatoes, onions and cilantro. The fish is sweet and flaky, the breading golden brown and crunchy. It’s what Chileans call BBB – bueno, bonito y barato (good, pretty and cheap). I’m in heaven, and I don’t see how this dish could possibly be improved on – until I have lunch the following day with the king of nuevo cuisine.

Tomás Olivera, a Valparaíso native and the executive chef at Adra, has a reputation for creating innovative Chilean dishes, particularly seafood, from traditional recipes. It’s an unlikely proposition considering the formal nature of this elegant marble- and lapis-lazuli-decorated dining room in what is undoubtedly Santiago’s finest hotel, the Ritz-Carlton. The menu touts “Mediterranean-style cuisine,” and yet many of the dishes – including the king crab appetizer – feature all the typical components you’d find at a more down-to-earth picada: king crab, avocado and mayonnaise (of course), with the surprising addition of quinoa, a staple of the country’s Atacama and Aymara Indians. A few years ago, you’d never have found this ingredient on a sophisticated Santiago menu. But the texture and nuttiness of the grain is the perfect foil to the soft crab, avocado and mayo.

Reinventing Grandma’s Recipes

Chilean food, Olivera tells me over an amuse-bouche of seared local tuna with dill-and-wasabi foam, is simple but honest. “It is the food prepared by your mom, your grandma. I haven’t really changed that. I’ve just dressed up something very simple, like this slice of tuna, with a couple of other elements and prepared it in a more modern fashion.” Which is what he’s done with Adra’s congrio, presenting two takes on the succulent white fish. The first, congrio frito con ensalada chilena, sounds and looks pretty much like the dish I had at Galindo. But Olivera has filleted the fish and lightly stuffed it with finely diced sweet potatoes in mayonnaise and then battered it with Japanese tempura flour for a light, golden crisp. In the second version – congrio a la plancha – he goes even further, sautéeing a small wedge of fish with baby asparagus and a light abalone sauce.

“I’ve slowly been increasing the number of Chilean dishes on the menu,” he says. “The first year, I had only one or two; now, after three years, I have four or five, depending on the season. When I told our general manager I wanted to do more Chilean dishes but elevate them, he said, ‘Tomás, are you sure?’ Then he tasted what I had in mind. Now, people come to the restaurant just to sample our national cuisine.”

But Olivera insists he’s not the only Santiago chef reinventing Chilean recipes. While I’m finishing up my lunch, he makes a phone call, setting up dinner reservations with a friend, Benjamin Cienfuegos, at his eponymously named restaurant back in Bellavista, to try his interpretation of caldillo de mariscos.

“In some ways, it’s a very straightforward fish-and-seafood stew, the sort of thing you could find at any picada in Mercado Central,” Cienfuegos later explains as I savour each complex spoonful, trying to guess the ingredients. “But I make it with a fish stock fortified with papas brujas – heirloom potatoes from the island of Chiloé – and local sweet potatoes. If you use really great local ingredients, you don’t need complicated preparations.”

Cienfuegos, who looks a bit like Johnny Depp with thick Elvis Costello glasses, excitedly talks about other like-minded chefs. Giuliano Capelli Guerra, the young chef who last year was the main draw at a festival in Paris showcasing Chilean food, has become the go-to person for Chilean embassies that want to add pizzazz to their receptions. And there’s Carlos García, the New York-trained owner of Fábula, the homey but stylish restaurant in the Providencia neighbourhood that serves up one of the finest meals during my trip.

García was born in Bolivia but has lived in Chile for the past 10 years. “When I moved here, there was the discovery of going to the market and learning what people eat,” he says. “I saw what was available; the variety and the quality is rico.” I eat at Fábula on a night when García has just switched to his winter menu. “This morning, I went to the market and saw a local rockfish called robalo and some wonderful octopus and thought, What can I do with these?”

As it turns out, he’s grilled the small octopus and serves it with a traditional pumpkin sopaipilla (a deep-fried biscuit-like pastry) and pebre (Chilean salsa made with onions and cilantro) while matching the robalo with sautéed celeriac and sweet potatoes. Says García, “Some nice octopus, a little rockfish, served with sopaipilla and pebre – these are dishes any grandmother in Chile would be familiar with.”

NEXT: WHEN IN SANTIAGO, EAT WHAT THE SANTIAGUINO CHEF EATS