Steeped in history and pulsing with culture, Santiago it also satisfies our hunger for appetizing cuisine. It is at the foot of the highest mountain in capitalCerro Manquehue, which is a restaurant hungry for Chile itself: the Borago .
In addition to the lounge that seats more than 50 diners and the kitchen open to our view, the house in the Vitacura region houses a testing area that serves as the true heart of the restaurant.
“It’s an area dedicated simply to cooking. And not only dishes from Boragó, but also from other projects. We have been researching and developing for 15 years. Imagine that, when we opened the restaurant, only one ingredient meant only one possibility and we were happy. Today, a single ingredient means 300 possibilities.”
who tells me is Rodolfo Guzman chef and owner of Boragó, who opened the house especially for me for a conversation about his cuisine, his influences and about his restless soul during the passage of CNN Travel & Gastronomy in Chile.
He welcomed me into his test kitchen, a space that resembles a laboratory, where recipes, tests, reservations and services are handwritten like chemical formulas on large slates and glasses.
Here, it is easy to understand why the Boragó is the most awarded restaurant in Chile currently in 6th place among the best in Latin America and on 43rd among the 50 best in the world according to 50 Best Restaurants .
With so many recognitions, Rodolfo doesn’t give up: Boragó continues and, if it depends on him, will always be an experimental restaurant.
a different chile
Through a lot of research, its cuisine is based on the recovery of the Mapuche culture, in which the ancestral knowledge are present in its instigating process of creation and experimentation.
He uses the knowledge of this people as the seed of Boragó, in which, through food, tells us the story of a Chile completely different.
What Rodolfo basically does is a Chilean food with native ingredients . The inputs it uses grow in very specific geographies within the country. All ingredients are therefore endemic .
When we started, we knew absolutely nothing about Chilean territory. We discover things we never dreamed of discovering. At that time restaurants wanted to bring in ingredients from outside, so Chilean ingredients were considered very common. Today that has totally changed
Rodolfo Guzman
15 years ago, when the restaurant opened, it was easier to find dishes with raw materials from other countries, such as Japanese shiitake, French truffles and Italian prosciutto, in the city’s gastronomic scene.
Today, thanks to the efforts of the chef, it is already possible to notice a movement of use of Andean ingredients and Patagonianfor example.
In the house, he works only with tasting menus whose dishes vary according to the seasonal ingredients, and he puts it on our table plants, flowers, fruits, fungi and everything else that the territory of Chile offers in a natural way.
“In Chile we have more than 300 wild fruits”, reveals the chef, information that most people do not know, even those connected in some way with gastronomy.
Explosions in mouth
While we were talking, Rodolfo introduced me to unique ingredients many of which I couldn’t even identify, which caused a real explosion of flavor in my mouth.
They are raw materials that we put on the tip of our tongue and feel their potency, with flavors that I have never experienced before.
The care taken in choosing the leaves and flowers is visible in their hands and eyes, and the chef and team give us a totally different experience than just waiting for the dish to arrive at the table: it is an unexpected journey full of surprises.
As a good part of Rodolfo’s creations come from a cuisine of roots and leaves, I ate some selected herbs while we talked about the restaurant, until, from a root of the chef’s hands, a salad was made to be savored with my own hands, without fork or knife.
Again, I was surprised by the flavors and the experience of taking the food in hand. The young professional’s restlessness and genius are reflected in the extensive knowledge that is served with a simple dish.
By social media, the award-winning chef also shares some of his compositions. One of the examples used in his cooking is the loyo, a mushroom endemic to Chile that has emerged from the same soil for the last 160 million years without mutating.
With this ingredient, he makes a unique dessert: the sweet makes room for umami, one of the five basic tastes of the palate.
The mushroom stem is recreated with a piece of kollof, a native seaweed, which the chef fills with an emulsion of Arrayán, an endemic wild fruit that grows around the loyos. The exterior is seasoned with fresh yarrow, caramelized seaweed and Arrayán salt. There are countless learnings in each dish!
Overnight success
But how was the acceptance of working on a gastronomy that goes beyond a mere traditional Chilean cuisine and seeks indigenous and ancestral knowledge to compose the menu?
“I would love to say that it was part of a strategic plan, but the truth is that the story of Boragó is not like that. It’s a very small restaurant that exploded overnight. The famous list came and people from all over the world came to know that we existed”, says the chef.
Today, the restaurant’s disputed tables can only be occupied upon reservation in advance. But it was not always so.
“The Boragó was in decline, I tried to sell it five times. It’s very frustrating, I thought I was going to be arrested. Before getting on the list, it was an empty restaurant, like a desert”, recalls Rodolfo.
The list, however, came out and, in the first year that the house got its deserved place among the best in Latin America, in 2013, the tables had turned. “The next day it was impossible to get a chair”, recalls the chef.
meticulous provenance
With a kitchen filled with so many attributes and studies, it is inevitable to worry about the origin of the ingredients.
To reflect on the plate what the Chilean land offers, the food comes from undisturbed soils collected for approx. 200 small producers country, which is why the dishes can vary even during each meal.
You vegetables grow as naturally as possible in a location half an hour from the restaurant and are used to the fullest.
Everything that comes from the sea comes directly from fishermen, without intermediaries, and the water served on the tables comes from the rain of the Patagonia with a high degree of purity.
The milk, used mainly in ice cream, is milked by the team itself and comes from natural breeding.
All this helps in the task of trying this other Chile that the chef values so much, in which we take a journey through an interesting ancestral cuisine.
“We really want Chilean cuisine 100 years from now to be 100 times more delicious than today”, concludes Rodolfo Guzmán. I’m rooting for that too.
Borago
Avenida San José María Escrivá de Balaguer 5970, Vitacura, Región Metropolitana, Santiago, Chile
Phone: +56 2 2953-8893
Reservations via site.
Source: CNN Brasil
Bruce Belcher is a seasoned author with over 5 years of experience in world news. He writes for online news websites and provides in-depth analysis on the world stock market. Bruce is known for his insightful perspectives and commitment to keeping the public informed.
