50 Best Award, Chilean

Rodolfo GUZMAN

Chef Rodolfo Guzman : unearthing Chile’s gastronomical identity

 

 

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Rodolfo Guzmán is the head chef and owner of the world-renowned Boragó restaurant. After having been formed in some of the most famous restaurants in Chile and Europe, Rodolfo Guzmán opens Boragó in 2006. From there, Guzmán has rewritten the culinary rules in a process that has led him to introduce numerous ways of re-thinking about the Chilean cuisine, cooking methods, native ingredients and Chilean products to the world.

Together with his team, he has documented the uses and properties of his country’s endemic pantry, exploring new possibilities, based on ingredients that had never been considered, such as millenary foods from Chilean natives. His collaborative work has led him to interact with more than 200 producers, and foragers of the Chilean territory, privileged access a very unique produce in the world and what has become a seasonal ritual for the Boragó team since the very begining.

In 2015 Boragó was honored in the select list of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, where he has been for eight consecutive years. Later, he creates the CIB, the first research center for food in Chile, which himself consider to be a result of having classified and categorized the Chilean territory with ¨food eyes¨, in his own words “only 10 years ago an autochthonous ingredient meant just one possibility for us and we were happy with that, now a days a Chilean ingredient means at least 300 possibilities”. The CIB seeks to domesticate native ingredients in a circular way, using them as new foods with delicious results.

An exhaustive quest to unearth Chile’s gastronomical identity is paramount to Boragó’s 16 to 20-course ‘Endémica’ menu, which changes depending on what arrives at the kitchen door each day. Rodolfo Guzmán works with tiny producers and foragers across Chile, from the southern-most reaches of Patagonia to the arid Atacama Desert in the north, as well as sourcing vegetables from his own backyard in the restaurant’s biodynamic farm and orchard. It is an approach that earned Boragó the Latin America’s 50 Best Sustainable Restaurant Award in 2018, along with a regular place in the top five of the continent’s best restaurants and a spot among the World’s 50 Best.

 

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