How Rodolfo Guzmán tamed and popularised Chile’s wild food
The Boragó chef convinced hostile diners and critics that Chile was home to some of the world's greatest ingredients
Chilean chef, restaurateur and Phaidon author Rodolfo Guzmán never forgot the Summers he spent with his Grandmother an hour's drive from Santiago. There, he explains in his book Boragó, he would drink milk still warm from the cow, mountain water from a rooftop can and gather eggs as the chickens that laid them clucked and scurried around his feet. All of this instilled him in the idea of food as “real and traceable”, local, never to be taken for granted.
In 2008, Guzmán opened his restaurant Boragó. He had cut his teeth working as a chef at some of Europe's finest restaurants but rather than import their ingredients, he was determined to create a cuisine made up of local produce, to reconnect Chileans with their own culinary heritage. He could not understand why Santiago's existing restaurants worked with frozen seafood and meat, eschewing indigenous ingredients such as mushrooms, seaweeds, and seaside plants such as halophytes. Young and idealistic, he sought to change all that.
Ironically, despite promoting local produce, Guzmán met local resistance - apathy from Santiago's diners, contempt from his country's restaurant critics who regarded Boragó's fare as insulting to their cultivated palates. Only when the international press took notice of Guzmán's fusion of European-inspired flair and Chilean authenticity that Boragó's business began to boom.
To find out more about the chef who is putting real Chilean food on the plate (and on the map) order a copy of Boragó here.