Japanese cuisine

The Japanese community in Chile is small and long-standing, but its cuisine went mainstream in Santiago from the 1980s and 1990s by another route: sushi. First in restaurants in Providencia and Las Condes, then in every neighborhood, with a local version that added avocado, cream cheese and fried rolls until it became a genre of its own, "Chilean sushi".

Over the last decade Japanese cooking stopped being only sushi: ramen, izakayas, teppanyaki, tonkatsu and Japanese pastry are concentrated in Providencia, Barrio Italia and Lastarria, with Japanese cooks and Chileans trained in Japan. It is a counter-and-season cuisine found in Santiago in both its everyday and its white-tablecloth versions.