Boragó

Boragó is a tasting-menu restaurant in Santiago, Chile, on Avenida San José María Escrivá de Balaguer in the Vitacura district. It cooks only with Chilean produce, gathered from Patagonia in the south to the Atacama Desert in the north.

Rodolfo Guzmán opened it in his home city at the end of 2006. His path to the stove began in an American bakery, where he moved from washing pots to baking biscuits and cakes, and continued at a cookery school in Chile. A friend's stories about El Bulli then sent him to Spain, first to Madrid and later to the Basque Country, after a place at The French Laundry fell through over US visa rules. He came back with one plan: a restaurant built entirely on ingredients that grow in Chile.

Santiago diners of the time wanted foreign food, and for years Boragó stood mostly empty while Guzmán tried in vain to find a buyer for it. The change came with the first Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants list, announced in Lima. A friend had to tell Guzmán that Boragó was on it, and the morning after the ceremony his team phoned to say that every table was booked. The restaurant later joined The World's 50 Best Restaurants list and returned to it year after year, and in 2021 it received the Sustainable Restaurant Award.

Endémica, the tasting menu, changes with whatever reaches the kitchen door each day. Hundreds of small producers and foragers supply it, and vegetables also come from a biodynamic farm and orchard that the restaurant runs outside the city. Guzmán and his cooks have documented the uses of native plants and wild foods, among them old ingredients of the Mapuche people that restaurant kitchens had ignored. Plates often look like something else: an ice cream arrives shaped as a mushroom on a leaf, and an asparagus and zucchini course is laid out after the sunflower paintings of Van Gogh.