‘Eat locally and eat seasonally’ is what people say when they’re recommending healthy meals that have a low impact on the planet. It’s a great aspiration, but one that’s not always simple to stick to with a busy lifestyle. When the convenience of a supermarket or home delivery is there, sometimes it’s easier to eat your five a day by throwing in a packet of green beans, even if they have just been flown in from Guatemala or Kenya.
When you’re travelling however, it’s the perfect rule. I think that few things get you closer to the culture than what’s on your plate. That’s as true in Chile as anywhere else. This is a country that’s famous for wine, but Chile’s food is less well-known. On a recent trip to Los Lagos – Chile’s verdant Lake District – I went in search of the best place for foodies, and I was not disappointed!
Farm to table in Los Lagos
The Chilean Lake District is the greenest and rainiest part of the country by some distance. Clouds roll in from the Pacific Ocean and bringing rain to the fertile volcanic soil here. It is absolutely perfect for agriculture – it feels like you could drop a seed in the ground and a plant would pop up in no time.
As someone who grew up in England, the rain and greenery should make me feel right at home, but when I moved to Chile I settled in the the Atacama Desert, which is the highest and driest part of the country, so flying to the lush surroundings of Pucón felt like quite a shock. But I knew that this region was where I would find some of Chile’s best farm-to-table eating.
Farm-to-table dining is a pretty simple concept. It’s all about eating where the food is produced, or as close to it as possible. Ingredients come straight from the farm rather than through an intermediary to shorten the distance from the field to your plate. Just as the country has undergone a craft beer revolution in recent years, dining is now following suit. And in the fertile farmland of Los Lagos where eating local is a mantra, the food miles are barely even miles at all.
Vira Vira
The first place I tasted my way around was Vira Vira, an all-inclusive lodge just under half an hour’s drive from Pucón. It’s completely surrounded by forest, tucked into private land between Villarica and Huerquehue National Parks.
Vira Vira is in the heart of the traditional homeland of the Mapuche, the area’s first inhabitants, and many of the guides and staff at the lodge have Mapuche heritage. Every day I was there I could go with them out on different adventure activities in the wilderness, but what really attracted me was the food!
Plenty of lodges have their own greenhouses and vegetable patches, but Vira Vira goes one further and makes its own cheese as well. I saw cows grazing in the lodge grounds when I arrived, and was invited on a tour of the cheese factory to see the milk and curds being turned into delicious wheels of cheese ready to be laid down for maturing, or fresh balls of a local burrata that were bursting with life.
The lodge keeps sheep too, which were growing fat and happy on the thick pasture. As a vegetarian, they were safe from me, and the gardens were absolutely bursting with produce that I was very happy to tuck in to. In the lodge’s restaurant, decorated in minimalist wood that felt almost Scandinavian, I tucked into sweet chargrilled vegetables that had been pulled from the ground that morning and crunchy salads with zingy dressings.
Each meal I ate there had been prepared almost exclusively with ingredients that came from the lodge, but there was no suggestion that this limited options for the chefs – rather it was an opportunity they were happy to embrace. The wine was the only element that was brought in , but since the Lake District is hardly known for grapes, I couldn’t complain about a bottle or two having come from the Santiago wine valleys! I left looking forward to what else the region had to offer me.
100K
In search of more good food, I joined my Swoop colleagues Lujan and Alicia to eat at 100K, a dining experience near Puerto Varas. Here I knew that the drinks would be as local as the food, because this is a region packed with excellent craft breweries.
The Lake District’s taste for beer comes from the German immigrants that settled here from the second half of the 19th Century, and some of their descendants now operate the family-run farm and restaurant at 100K. Around the table, you can hear German being spoken among themselves, as well as Spanish and English for visitors.
First, we had to harvest produce for the table. We could have opted just to eat lunch at the restaurant, but the great joy of 100K is to sample the whole experience – picking and preparing the food in small groups, and then getting to be kitchen helpers under the watchful eye of a chef who secretly runs the whole show. Finally, you all sit down at a big table and eat together.
It all felt incredibly hospitable as well as very hands on. We were greeted with a menu and then turned loose in the gardens and polytunnels to find and pick the produce. The gardens are very picturesque, surrounded by greenery with Lake Llanquihue sparkling in the distance. The lake provided fish for the table – aside from the local beer, this was the only part of the meal we cooked that didn’t come from the farm itself.
After all the picking and the cooking, the rest of the half day dissolved into the sort of long lazy lunch that holidays are made of, with good food and lively conversation. We felt like we were genuinely being welcomed into the family. For me, it was like stepping back in time, eating big spoonfuls of rhubarb crumble like I used to have at my grandma’s house when I was a child. Grandma didn’t get to flavour hers with murta berries (also known as Chilean guava), but as a demonstration of how food can catapult you in time, places and cultures, 100K definitely gave me a taste of something special.
Hotel Awa
I stayed close to Puerto Varas for my final farm to table dining experience, checking into Hotel Awa on the shores of Lake Llanquihue. Saying it has a lakeside setting does it a bit of a disservice really – my room and the restaurant both had floor-to-ceiling glass windows that looked directly out to Osorno Volcano, and in the evening I could sit out on the terrace and watch the lake turn to gold as the sun set behind the snowy peak. It was absolutely serene.
Awa also gets plenty of attention for its spa, but what about the food? The style here is definitely more fine dining than at 100K, but everything still comes down to the freshest and most local produce. Guests are invited for a tour of the greenhouses and gardens, while the chef prepares a gourmet meal. There were glossy heirloom tomatoes on the vine, surrounded by bright orange marigolds for companion planting – needless to say that everything here is grown under strict organic principles. Thick bunches of aromatic herbs left their oils on my fingers as I ran my hands through them.
This was the closest I was allowed to get to having dirt under my fingernails. Instead, I got changed for dinner and settled in with a flinty glass of white wine and that volcano view, before dinner was ready.
The meal was as immaculate as I had hoped for, with almost as much care going into the presentation as the preparation. Delicate flower petals decorate the salads, while the roasted vegetable tart seemed to have been constructed with the precision of an artist. Everything was beautifully balanced and delicious. The chocolate mousse for dessert was a dark delight, and a nod to the fact that as part of the Lake District that welcomed Swiss immigrants as well as Germans: Puerto Varas has plenty of artisanal chocolaterías as well as breweries.
The next day, Osorno tempted me to explore further afield, with the promise of hiking or rafting on the Petrohue River. The Chilean Lake District has always specialised in great outdoor activities, but now I know that there is another reason to be drawn here – it is a place where the kitchen table and the farm or garden are never far from each other, but closely tied together, to offer a fresh take on Chilean food culture.
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