What to eat in Patagonia

Patagonian food explains itself once you look at the landscape: plenty of sheep, plenty of cold sea and very few vegetables. Out of that scarcity came a cuisine of a few things done very well.

Cordero al palo

This is the dish everything else revolves around. A Magellanic lamb, split open and fixed to an iron cross beside a wood fire, turned slowly for three or four hours. It gets nothing but salt, and that is exactly the point.

Magallanes lamb has meat unlike that of central Chile: the animals graze outdoors all year on coirón bunchgrass, and you can taste it.

You eat it with your hands, at the estancia (sheep ranch) or at the grill house, and there is always too much. That is part of the point, too.

King crab

King crab (centolla) from the Strait of Magellan is the other emblem. It is fished between July and November —the rest of the year is closed season, and respecting it matters— and is usually served boiled and cold with a little lemon, or baked in a chupe, a creamy gratin.

A useful warning: if someone offers you king crab in January, ask where it came from. The closed season exists because the fishery came close to collapse, and off-season tourist demand is what puts pressure on it.

The cold sea

Beyond king crab, the southern menu features southern hake, golden kingklip (congrio dorado), róbalo, sea urchins and cholga mussels. Cold water yields firm-fleshed fish that stand up well to the griddle and don’t need a sauce.

In Puerto Aysén and Puerto Chacabuco, farmed salmon is part of both the local economy and the menu. In the fishing coves, what’s worth ordering is whatever was caught that morning.

Calafate

A thorny shrub that bears a purple berry the size of a blueberry, tart and with a flavor unlike anything from farther north. It turns up in jam, ice cream, sours and desserts.

The saying you hear all over the south —“whoever eats calafate comes back”— is Tehuelche in origin and by now more of a local joke than a belief, but nobody can resist trying it.

Mate and torta frita

In Aysén, culturally closer to the Argentine pampas than to central Chile, mate (the shared herbal infusion) goes around all day. If you’re offered some, accepting is the right answer: it is a gesture of hospitality, not a formal invitation.

It comes with tortas fritas, the southern take on sopaipillas (fried dough), which down there are eaten with the rain as an excuse.

And something that isn’t food

The water. Throughout the region it comes out of the tap and you can drink it without filtering or boiling, and in many places it comes straight from snowmelt. Bringing a reusable bottle saves you money and spares plastic in a place where the trash has to be trucked out.