Chile Food & Drink

Recommended Food & Drink

Chile stretches over a variety of landscapes and has a large range of food and drink. Its extensive coastline makes seafood one of the highlights of Chilean cuisine. Choose from fresh shellfish, salmon, oysters, scallops, and more. If you have a sweet tooth try pastel de choclo, a typically South American dish based on sweetcorn. If you’d rather have something a little saltier, opt for some savory empanadas and sopaipillas – a delicious fried pastry made with pumpkin. Chile is just into their empanadas, as Argentina is. For meat lovers, lomito, a pork steak, is a crowd-pleaser as well as the spicy chorizo con pan.

Enhance any meal with Chilean wine. Chile’s wine region produces world-class wine, a perfect complement to any Chilean cuisine. Choose a Cabernet Sauvignon, or a Carmenere from the Colchagua Valley, known for its fertile red varieties. If you prefer white wine, make sure to try a Sauvignon Blanc from the Casablanca Valley, a climate ideal for producing white-wine grapes. And before you leave Chile, you must try a Pisco Sour, a popular South American cocktail.

We offer plenty of South American Wine Tours that explore the Chilean wine region. Take the Santiago & Puerto Varas Wineries Tour through Chile’s natural and cultural wonders: Santiago, the Mediterranean coast, glacial lakes, mountainous regions, and more. Or maybe, you’re looking for a shorter wine tour such as The Best of Chilean Wines Tour. On this tour, you will explore the city of Santiago as well as the popular wine regions nearby. For an extensive wine and gourmet tour, choose The South American Wine Tour. This 10-day tour is perfect for foodies and wine enthusiasts looking to explore the best wine regions of Chile, the small wineries of Uruguay, and a tango show in Argentina.

Restaurants in Chile:

• Puerto Fuy: This award-winning upscale restaurant combines modern French techniques and Chilean cuisine to provide you with superb seafood.
• Tiramisu: With great ratings, Tiramisu is the busiest and most popular pizza restaurant in Santiago using fresh ingredients at a reasonable price. Head to the restaurant early to ensure getting a table. It is not uncommon to see a long line waiting outside for the restaurant to open.
• Bocanáriz: As one of Santiago’s most famous places to enjoy wine, locals, and tourists gather at this open wine bar.

Typical Chilean food and drink:

• Paila Marina: a traditional Chilean seafood soup or light stew usually served in a paila.
• Pastel de Choclo: typical Chilean casserole made with corn and meat, beef or bacon, and is traditionally baked in a clay pot. Ingredients may also include olives, hard-boiled eggs, onions and raisin
• Empanadas: pastry filled with meat, cheese or mussels
• Cazuela: homemade stew with beef, chicken, corn, rice and potatoes, pumpkin and corn on the cob (there are variations with seafood too)
• Asado: barbecue of beef, pork or chicken (very famous also in Argentina and Uruguay)
  Reineta, Congrio, Corvina: the most typical fish
• Locos: a rare type of mollusc
• Chupe: traditional stew made with chicken, red meat, lamb or beef tripe and other offal, or with fish, shrimp, crayfish or shellfish such as loco, and vegetables, potatoes or yuca (if you are on the coast do not miss the chupe de Marisco o de Jaiba (crab). Delicious!
• Centolla: king crab with tender meat of reddish color
• Ceviche
• Humitas: prepared with fresh corn, onion, basil, and butter or lard. They are wrapped in corn husks and baked or boiled.
• Sopaipilla: snacks made of crispy pastry traditionally made with pumpkin (squash) and are deep-fried.
• Completo: one of the most beloved Chilean street foods. Served with sausage, chopped tomato, mayonnaise, and sauerkraut. The completo Italiano is also quite popular and comes with chopped tomatoes, mashed avocado and mayonnaise (it takes the name from the colors of its ingredients, which remind the Italian flag)
• Bistec a la pobre: is literally translated as “Poor Man’s Steak”, however, the size of the portion is anything but poor! It consists of a large sirloin steak served with grilled onion, two fried eggs, and a side salad or fries.
• Pebre (spicy sauce): If you love spicy food you’ll love the pebre sauce, which is often served to accompany your meals! It is made of tomatoes, onions, garlic, olive oil herbs, and peppers and coriander.
• Manjar (also known as dulce de leche): is a very popular sweet dressing made of condensed milk and sugar, which can be found in various countries of South America (e.g. Peru, Argentina, Uruguay) despite each of them declares to make it slightly different from each other! It can be found in the majority of homes and bakeries. Some typical sweets which are commonly made with manjar are the Alfajores.
• Curanto (Chiloe): A traditional food of Chiloé Island in southern Chile, curanto is cooked with meat, potatoes, shellfish, a potato bread called milcao, vegetables and dumplings. What’s unique about curanto is that it is prepared using hot stones in a deep hole in the ground. The tradition comes from an ancient tribe of the island that is now extinct.
• Avocados can be really tasty in Chile!
• Cochayuyo: is a variety of seaweed that is found in abundance on the sands of Chilean beaches, and is becoming quite popular in the last years
• Macha a la Parmesana: a starter made with the macha, a saltwater clam that is native to Chile. The clams are baked in their shell, mixed with cheese, wine with some variation of ingredients depending on the recipe.
• Cherimoya fruit: (also in other locations of South America)
• Terremoto: (literally “Earthquake” in Spanish) is a traditional cocktail made of Pipeño (Sweet fermented wine), Pineapple ice-cream and Grenadine syrup. For people who don’t have a sweet tooth, the grenadine can be swapped with a bitter liqueur like Pisco, Fernet or Rum.