"People know about Chilean wine," chef Matias Palomo told me. "But we want to show them that there's a lot more: dried fruits, olive oil, mushrooms, fish."
We were sitting at Haven, on Lincoln Road (the non-pedestrian part), and I had cut into Palomo's preparations for the evening's dinner, which he was making along with Haven chef Todd Erickson. Palomo wore, villainishly, an all-black chef's outfit, his hair pulled back in a mini samurai bun, though he was soft-spoken, thoughtful and friendly.
He said the evening's meal would use traditional Chilean products in non-traditional ways, like empanadas with mussels and merquen-cured Chilean trout with quinoa, mixed berries and avocado. Merquen, he explained, are smoked chile peppers. Chiles from Chile.
He talked about the variety of foods found in the longest country in the world. "We have 800 different types of potatoes," he said. "Two hundred and fifty kinds of fish. And we eat," he said dispiritedly, "eight." He sounded like a man on a mission to open the eyes not just of the world, but of fellow Chileans, to the country's cornucopia. And I began to wonder if the next favored food, after Peruvian, will be Chilean.
The dinner was delicious.
