The two restaurants I most wanted to visit during our time in Chile couldn’t have been more different.

Rancho Doña Maria, by the side of the highway forty minutes outside of Santiago, serves empanadas baked in clay ovens and pork ribs to die for. Boragó, in the heart of Santiago, offers extravagant eight- and sixteen-course tasting menus, and could be considered South America’s Alinea.

Yet both represent the county’s cuisine at its finest.

Boragó currently comes in at #8 on a list of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants, which therefore puts it at #1 for Chile. And after having eaten the restaurant’s most elaborate option, the Raqko tasting menu (the shorter tasting menu, still apparently mind-blowing, is called Endemica), we’d have to agree.

When we arrived for our 8:00 p.m. reservation, we were greeted by name and ushered into an empty restaurant … which again told us that if we want to dine at fashionable hours while in South America, we’re going to have to start making much later reservations! (If I remember correctly, the tasting menu at Astrid y Gaston in Lima wasn’t even available before 10:30 p.m.) The next patrons didn’t arrive for another half an hour, so for a brief period, Boragó was ours.

But a note of apology as I begin—my report on Boragó will be picture heavy and text light, because the explanations given by the (extremely friendly and knowledgable) servers for each dish were very complex, with the sourcing and harvesting of each ingredient being explained in depth, with far more detail than my memory could process. Luckily, the dishes themselves are so beautiful that the photos alone should still satisfy. (more…)