DEAILLE TAM Chile power I
n 2013 when Chilean chef Rodolfo Guzmán got the call telling him that The World’s 50 Best Restaurants would be launching a regional edition for Latin America, he reacted with indifference. For the previous six years
he had worked tirelessly in his restaurant Boragó in the Chilean capital city of Santiago, but was
faced with an empty dining room most of the time. He had unsuccessfully tried to sell the restaurant five times and was up to his neck in debt. “My friend said they would be hosting Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants in Lima, Peru,” he recalls. “I said: ‘Very good, I wish them the best, I am trying to sell this place, can you help me?’.” “No,” his friend said, “you are on the
list. You have to go”. Though he was convinced that it would be unlikely to turn around his luck or that of Boragó, Guzmán scraped together the money for the trip to Lima for the announcement that his restaurant made eighth place on the list. “The next day I got a call from my
team; they said we were fully booked,” he says. “We didn’t know what it was like to serve a full restaurant, so we were nervous, but we were ready.” Though he tells this story about
the change in fortunes with a sense of humour now, it was not a laughing matter at the time. “For a chef there is no worse
A champion of his country’s endless natural pantry, chef Rodolfo Guzmán tells Tina Nielsen how his restaurant Boragó went from obscurity to a place among the world’s best
punishment or bigger pressure than an empty restaurant,” he says, comparing the story to Cinderella. “We expected nothing and got everything.”
Chile’s natural larder
Elevated to a place among the world’s elite restaurants, today Guzmán is a man in demand. His restaurant, proudly championing Chile’s wildly diverse natural bounty, is now consistently fully booked by diners from across the world and he is a well-respected chef on the gastronomic world map. As we speak, he is preparing for a three-week residency in Madrid where he will be following in the footsteps of chefs including Mauro Colagreco and Grant Achatz cooking at the InResidence pop-up. It is a journey that started in 2006 when Guzmán first opened Boragó in his home city. At a time when there was no interest in food in Chile, and even less in gastronomy, inspired by a two- year stint in Europe he returned home determined to capitalize on the unique nature of Chile, with an endless supply of ingredients endemic to the country. Guzmán’s path to becoming a chef
started in his formative years. Though he’d not had ambitions to cook, food was a central focal point of family life at home and Guzmán struggled at school. “I wasn’t an academic child, and it just didn’t work out for me in school,” he says. Later in life he went to the US to save up some money and ended up working
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Inspired by his experiences in Spain Guzmán was determined to explore the unique ingredients of Chile’s natural larder
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