Food & Drink

Chilean cuisine is born from the meeting of the indigenous peoples' pantry and the one the Spaniards brought in the 16th century. From the Mapuche and Andean side come corn, potato, beans, squash, chili and merkén; from the European side, wheat, beef, pork, onion, the vine and the olive. From that crossing come the dishes that feel most our own today: cazuela, pastel de choclo, humitas, porotos granados and the pino empanada.

Santiago is where that cuisine became urban. Around the Mercado Central, opened in 1872, and la Vega grew the cocinerías and picadas that served caldillo, charquicán and plateada for generations; and in the cafés and soda fountains of downtown the completo, the chacarero and the barros luco were invented, sandwiches that exist nowhere else in the world.

The cuisines of those who arrived kept joining that table. The 19th-century European migration —Italian, Spanish, German and French— left Sunday pasta, kuchen and the pastries of the confectioneries; in the early 20th century the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese families of Patronato brought kibbe and Arab empanadas, and decades later the same neighborhood welcomed the Korean community.

Since the 1990s Latin American migration changed the map again: Peruvian cooking went from the cocinerías of la Vega to almost every neighborhood, Barrio Meiggs consolidated as the Chinese hub and in the last decade Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Bolivian and Haitian food settled in downtown, in Independencia and in the student neighborhoods. In parallel, Lastarria, Bellas Artes, Barrio Italia and Bellavista added bistros, Japanese, Indian and Southeast Asian cuisine.

The result is a city where cazuela and ceviche live a block apart, and where you can travel much of the world with a Bip card without stopping eating Chilean. This page starts with that home-grown cuisine and continues with the ones the city adopted, neighborhood by neighborhood.