If you follow me, then you know that I love food. I don’t consider myself a picky eater (although I did stop eating meat about 3 years ago) so finding unique and delicious restaurants during our travels is always a highlight. Having recently visited Chile, I wanted to share our favorite restaurants from the trip with you. These are definitely not to be missed on your travels through Santiago and the Lake District.
Santiago
Bocanariz, José Victorino Lastarria 276
We ducked into this wine bar for lunch on our last day in Santiago and consider this our best meal of the entire trip! If you’re a wine drinker, you’re in luck, because they are very serious about their wine selection here. Of course, we happily sampled some wine, but what really wowed us was the food and outstanding service. The menu consists of tapas, small plates and entrees so we ordered a few different things to share. Everything was amazing. Be sure to order the quinoa salad (this is a small plate but is a huge portion!) and the ceviche.
Peumayen Ancestral Food, Constitución 136
This was a really unique restaurant experience. The concept is native Chilean cuisine, which translates to the restaurant serving modern food with ancient Chilean ingredients and cooking methods. The kitchen sends out some really interesting and tasty treats to sample like a variety of breads, including a tiny bread topped with horse meat (I couldn’t bring myself to try this). My husband’s fish was smoked too much for our taste, but we loved my quinoa-vegetable dish.
Puerto Varas
La Jardinera, Blanco Encalada 1160
This restaurant is tucked away into a residential neighborhood and surprised us with its wonderful food, fun soundtrack (a random mix of hip hop, Pearl Jam and lots of other songs) and lovely wait staff. Salads, by American standards, were a bit hard to find in Chile, and I loved the green salad with shrimp here. So so good. I can’t remember what my husband ordered, but I can highly recommend the salad and the salmon dinner.
Mesa Tropera, Santa Rosa 161
We had dinner here on the restaurant’s 3rd night of being open, and it was such a fun last night in Puerto Varas. The restaurant is gorgeous – modern, a touch funky with the most beautiful lake setting. It bills itself as a pizzeria, but our favorite part of the meal was actually the ceviche. We sampled ceviche basically daily while in Chile and, hands down, this was the best ceviche of our trip. Since the restaurant was newly opened, there were a couple of menu items that we couldn’t sample, but the pizza and bulgur salad were great. Chilean pizza crust is much thinner than what we’re used to – my husband compares it to a cracker. We really hope this restaurant continues to do well – we chatted with the lovely owners throughout our evening (they lived in Boulder, Colorado, for a few years) and enjoyed learning about the restaurant’s history.
Food Trucks, lake front
We stopped here for lunch twice, the food was that good. Granted, we can only speak to the falafel sandwich and burger, they were delicious. Ingredients were fresh, prices were good and options are varied. Grab a sandwich from the several food truck options and find a spot along the water for a beautiful lake view.
If you don’t eat meat, it may be tricky at times to find healthy meal options in some of the tiny towns around the lake. We drove for hours on a Sunday afternoon and finally landed in the city of Osorno, thinking this would be our best bet – but, even here, we couldn’t find many options and ended up eating in a mall food court. Yes, we were that hangry.
Oh, one last tip: Chileans love their Kuchen, a tradition of eating cake that stems from the German settlers here. You’ll find signs for Kuchen every time you turn around in the Lake District, which made me feel oddly at home there thanks to the German influence.
A couple of restaurants didn’t make this list (we had one particularly lousy dinner during our visit) so if you want to play it safe, follow my recommendations on your next trip!
