“How to cut it, who was eating it—Mapuches, Kawésqars or other natives, how to cook it, what we did, what we thought and imagined so we won’t forget next year,” Chef Guzmán says. “You have a very small amount of time during the year experimenting... I knew it was going to be a very long learning process but, in the end, I had the feeling that it was going to be good.” Suddenly, after five years, he had an epiphany. “Holy, we have a big amount of information. This is almost like a dictionary. This is amazing!” he says. “We knew nothing about this and now we know how to execute in a totally different way.” He responded by moving the restaurant to a much larger location, wrote a book called Boragó: Coming from the South, and opened a research center called Centro de investigación para la comida Boragó (CIB). At the CIB, the work focuses on four main neglected
at least five times and I was very close [to doing so] in the last one because we were totally in bankruptcy.” Despite all the challenges, the team forged ahead. “We try to move forward learning from all the native ingredients… that only grow in a very specific region in Chile for a very short amount of time during the year,” he says. “It’s an important point. Boragó is not a concept. Our food is not based on technique. We decided in the beginning to erase everything we learned from Europe and start from zero.” The restaurant’s way of cooking is based on the Chilean flavour of the land, which is very different than the European technique. They also experiment with the cooking methods of the Mapuches. “The Chilean condiment is smoking—everything is on wood,” he says. “All the Mapuches were doing was based on smoking, preserving, fermenting. At Boragó we didn’t invent anything… but [be] a continuation of the Mapuche culture.” “I believe that humans move back and forth in time,” he says. “I could show you a cooking method where you say ‘This is amazing, I’ve never seen this in my life. This is the smartest thing I’ve ever seen!’ but it is the same cooking method that was used two thousand years ago. But we retraced it into something absolutely new.” Boragó has a very simple kitchen that uses a limited amount of technology. One of their signature dishes is the reinvention of lamb on a cross, which is a traditional Patagonian specialty. “It’s quite amazing what we do on top of the embers. It’s very special. You could see that (we don’t) even have a plancha! Everything is open-fire,” he says. As they continued to learn the native ways, they started writing down their work.
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