The best restaurant in Santiago does not look like a restaurant. From the street it is a plain facade in the hip Barrio Italia neighbourhood, the kind of frontage that in Barnsley would suggest a closed-down business and in Santiago suggests a deliberate rejection of the visual language of restaurants that want to be noticed. Through the doors was a courtyard with a central fountain and a second-floor balcony, a space that had once been a family home and retained enough of that character to make the transition to restaurant feel genuinely comfortable rather than self-consciously rustic. A live band was playing in the corner at a volume that allowed conversation without requiring it to compete.
The menu offered two dishes that the waiter described as award-winning with the confidence of someone whose awards are real. The first was a local white fish, served on wilted spinach with a cream sauce that incorporated something bright and acidic underneath the richness, possibly lemon, possibly the Ecuadorian influence that Chilean coastal cooking shares. The fish was delicate and the sauce was not, which is the correct arrangement. The second was a beef fillet wrapped in bacon, a combination that appears in various forms across South America with the slight variation of whether the bacon is smoked or cured, and which here had been cooked to the correct side of medium rare, the kind of thing that requires confidence in the meat. Chilean red wine, from a grape-growing region that benefits from the specific combination of Andean cold nights and Pacific warmth that produces the tannin structure the varietals here are good at, was the correct accompaniment at a price that felt honest.
The breakfast register in Santiago was more utilitarian: ham and cheese on a flat roll, strong bitter coffee, the city’s morning pragmatism expressed in food that fuels rather than celebrates. The central area in the commercial district was dominated by fast-food places selling hot dogs and sandwiches from counters designed with the chrome and efficiency of American diners, a aesthetic that South America absorbed from North America through television decades before the actual restaurants arrived and which produced, in Santiago’s case, a hybrid form that is both familiar and specifically itself. The hot dogs at Domino, a Chilean chain that occupies its corner of the city’s food culture with the confidence of an institution, were topped with avocado mayonnaise and a salsa that was sweeter than Mexican salsa and more interesting than it had any right to be for something eaten standing up at a counter for approximately three dollars fifty. The fresh juice that came with it cost one dollar fifty and tasted like it had been made that morning, which it had.
The servers at Domino spoke no English and I spoke no Spanish beyond the approximate, which produced the best kind of restaurant transaction: one conducted entirely on the merits of pointing, approximate pronunciation of menu items, and mutual goodwill. They were patient. I was grateful. The hot dog was very good.
The first was a local white fish, served on wilted spinach with a cream sauce that incorporated something bright and acidic underneath the richness, possibly...
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