Mercado Central is tourist-friendly and bountiful. (Alamy)
Chile plunges like a spear down South America, through forest, valley, desert and mountains, the sea alongside it all the way. Within the country’s biodiverse boundaries lie terroirs so numerous and varied that only locals, such as indigenous Mapuche, know what delicacies grow in any given one. Unlike, say, Szechuan peppercorns, Périgord truffles or acai berries, many Chilean treats have stayed local — and obscure.
But thanks largely to a growing number of ambitious, internationally trained chefs who canvas the country up and down for hyper-local food discoveries, devotees of New Naturalism cuisine now have a new destination. Chile’s capital, Santiago, offers competitive-minded foodies the ultimate prize: tasty edibles that no one you know has eaten.
To dip into Santiago’s endemic food offerings high and low, begin with the biggest food markets. The most famous among them, the tourist-friendly Mercado Central (Ismael Valdes Vergara 900, mercadocentral.cl) has long been dethroned as a genuine Santiaguino food mecca. This is still the place to go, though, when you want to sample the piscine wealth of a country with the fifth-longest coastline in the world.
Look for delicious endemic seafood like Chilean conger eel, Chilean sea urchin, loco (a big sea snail similar to abalone) or picoroco (giant barnacles). Don’t let aggressive, English-speaking restaurant touts convince you to eat at one of the overpriced tourist traps inside; dine with locals at one of the little places along the corridor outside the market (bring cash).
Right across the anemic Mapocho River at La Vega (Calle Antonia Lopez de Bello 760, lavega.cl) is where you’ll find the real, down-and-dirty Santiago market scene, complete with dim lighting, littered concrete floors, severed pig’s heads and cats sitting on cabbages. (Warning: Don’t go on a weekend unless you like being pushed around by huge crowds.)
Products from all over Chile’s 500-mile Central Valley can be found here. Embarking on a tour of this massive place requires fortification, so start with a mote con huesillo, the indigenous national drink of Chile. Like bubble tea, it’s a sweet, fruity liquid (dried peaches stewed in chancaca, a traditional Andean syrup made from unrefined sugar, honey and, sometimes, orange peel) mixed with chewy, starchy floaters (trigo mote, wheat berries processed with lye, like Mexican hominy).
Then look for:
* Raw Mapuche piñones: Huge pine nuts from the Araucaria araucana evergreen. The “nuts” of the monkey puzzle tree, a dinosaur-era plant that can live a thousand years, have forever been the main food of the indigenous Pehuenche, who made versions of bread and beer with them. (Chile’s Newen microbrewery makes a Pehuen Ale with them.)
* Merkén: A Mapuche spice mixture of dried and smoked goat’s horn red chiles, roasted coriander seeds and salt. It’s made only in the southern Araucanía region of Chile.
* Murtilla: As in “little myrtle”, aka “Chilean guava” or “strawberry myrtle.” The Mapuche were eating the berries from this endemic wild bush, which have a brief season in Patagonia, before the Spanish arrived.
* Cochayuyo: A kelp endemic to Chile’s coast, the Mapuche have cooked and eaten it for thousands of years.
* Toasted Gevuina: Aka Chilean hazelnuts. Completely unrelated to our hazelnuts, they’re sweet, smooth and crispy. Like monkey puzzle nuts, they’re produced by an endemic evergreen tree that grows mostly in Araucanía, where the Mapuche and their livestock have munched on them for eons.
Sourcing these items is sort of a chef’s extreme sport, with the reigning champ probably native Santiaguino chef Rodolfo Guzman, Chile’s answer to Denmark’s René Redzepi. A handsome former professional water-skier with a degree in biochemistry, Guzman did a stint at Andoni Luis Aduriz’s Mugaritz in Spain before opening Boragó (Nueva Costanera 3467, borago.cl) in 2007. Within a short time, he vaulted into the culinary stratosphere: award-magnet Boragó is the only Latin American place on Michelin’s current list of the 60 best restaurants in the world.
Boragó offers an “endémica” tasting menu (from $66, with optional $36 wine pairing) that changes frequently, sometimes daily. It blends Chilean finds (“sea strawberries,” the fruit of a succulent that has a brief growth season on coastal rocks; kra kra fish from Easter Island; tubers and flowers from Chiloé Island; herbs from Santiago mountainsides) and ancient techniques (smoking wood of indigenous trees, cooking on hot stones or in a mud oven), with the now familiar tools and tropes of the avant-garde chef (blow-torches, liquid nitrogen, dishes plated as miniature landscapes) and at least one of the naturalism movement’s sustainability-insulting extremes (flown-in Patagonian rainwater). It’s theatrical, but genuinely beautiful and delicious.
Early this year, Boragó gained a competitor for the “¿Quién es más endémico?” title, Peumayén (Constitución 136, peumayenchile.cl). Earthier and less precious, Peumayén’s delectable “ancestral cuisine,” created by Argentine chef Juan Manuel Peña, has not just Mapuche, but also Aymara and Rapa Nui roots. Here you can try horse steak, rabbit, salmon cooked in ash or Patagonian lamb, Chile’s answer to Argentine beef, all served with a sort of rustic elegance (entrees about $20).
Every Peumayén diner receives a fascinating “bread plate” that consists of six to eight small bread-like dishes arranged on a stone. Constituting a sort of historical bread map of Chile, they include tortillas de rescoldo (cooked in ash-covered embers), milcao (cooked, mashed and raw grated potatoes combined and, along with lard, made into potato pancakes), poe (Easter Island bread made with banana), milloquin (made from peas and beans), the aforementioned pine nut bread and catuto (made of wheat, hominy and honey).
Also on the ancestral carbs front, various Andean potato species show up as chuño puti (freeze-dried potato cooked with eggs, cheese, tomato and onion) and chochoca (potato starch mixed with wheat flour, lard and cracklings, wrapped around a long wooden cylinder and roasted over wood).
Like a Cubist artist who turns out to be brilliant at drawing from life, Peña also brings dishes as simple as roasted tomato and braised oxtail to a level of astonishing perfection. You’ll have a hard time choosing between those familiar dishes and the more exotic ones you can brag about back home.