Type “Chile food” into a search bar and you get a lot of peppers. This page is about the country. Chilean food grew out of Indigenous staples (potatoes, corn, beans, squash, chili), Spanish colonial technique and a layer of 19th-century French cooking.
The cliché says Chile means wine and seafood. True. But the everyday table runs on corn, beef, pumpkin and bread. If you came for heat, look at the table, not the pot: pebre, a fresh sauce of tomato, onion, cilantro, chili and oil.
Chile takes its empanadas as seriously as Argentina does. The classic empanada de pino is a baked wheat-flour pastry filled with chopped or ground beef, onion, hard-boiled egg, olives and raisins (the word pino comes from the Mapuche pirru). Yes, the raisins are on purpose. Other fillings run to cheese and seafood, baked or fried. At the Fiestas Patrias holidays on September 18 and 19 the empanada is the star, eaten before the barbecue, and it is a Sunday habit all year.
Some people file pastel de choclo under “for the sweet tooth.” Not quite. It is a savory corn pie: fresh corn (choclo) blended with milk and basil, spread over beef pino, chicken, black olives, hard-boiled egg and raisins, and baked in a clay dish. Some cooks sprinkle a little sugar on the corn crust.
Corn is harvested in the Chilean summer, which is when humitas appear: grated corn with basil and softened onion, wrapped in its own husks, tied and cooked.
Cazuela is the bowl Chile reaches for in cold weather: beef or chicken simmered in broth with yellow pumpkin, potato, corn on the cob and green beans, sometimes rice. Sopaipillas are rounds of fried dough made with pumpkin, which gives them their color and a faint sweetness. Eat them with pebre or avocado, or the winter way, pasadas, soaked in warm chancaca syrup of cane sugar, cinnamon and orange peel.
Then there is bistec a lo pobre, literally “poor man’s steak,” and the portion is anything but poor: a beef steak with French fries, fried onions and fried eggs. Order it on a day you walked a long way.
The completo is Chile’s hot dog, loaded with tomato, sauerkraut and mayonnaise; it has its own day, May 24. The one to know is the completo italiano: mashed avocado, diced tomato and mayonnaise, named for the colors of the Italian flag. Avocado is palta here. A lomito is thin-sliced roast pork kept hot in its juices, on a roll with avocado, tomato and mayonnaise. At Fiestas Patrias, look for choripán (longaniza sausage in a marraqueta roll) and anticuchos, grilled skewers, next to an asado of beef, pork, chicken and sausages, the barbecue Chile shares with Argentina and Uruguay.
Chile’s coastline runs 6,435 km (4,000 miles), and the menu follows it. Learn one word first: mariscos, shellfish.
Machas a la parmesana are razor clams baked on the half shell with white wine, butter and Parmesan until they turn pink, a classic on the coast around Valparaíso. Erizos, sea urchins, sit in the markets next to clams and crab claws. Paila marina is seafood soup served in a clay bowl, the paila: clams, mussels, conger eel, salmon and shrimp. Caldillo de congrio, conger eel stew with tomato, white wine and shellfish, is the hearty central-Chile version. Chupe de jaibas is a different idea: crab folded into bread soaked in milk, topped with cheese and baked in a clay dish until it browns. In the far south the prize is centolla, king crab, served in Punta Arenas as a creamy chupe de centolla.
Two notes before you order. Locos are a mollusk Chile protects closely: from the Arica y Parinacota region south to Aysén, catching and selling them is banned until December 31, 2028, except from authorized management areas, so ask where yours came from. And cochayuyo is no new trend. Indigenous peoples ate this seaweed long before the Spanish arrived, roasting it over embers and then cooking it for hours.
| Region | What to look for |
|---|---|
| The north: Arica, Iquique, the Atacama | Corvina ceviche; chairo, a soup of meat, potato and corn; calapurca, a soup cooked with hot stones; roast llama or alpaca |
| The central valleys: Santiago, Valparaíso | Empanadas de pino, pastel de choclo, summer humitas, cazuela de ave (chicken cazuela), caldillo de congrio |
| The south and the lakes | Salmon and trout, lamb, wild mushrooms, seafood |
| Chiloé | Curanto, with milcao and chapalele potato breads |
| Patagonia: Punta Arenas | Lamb on a spit; creamy king crab stew |
| Rapa Nui (Easter Island) | Umu ta’o, the island’s curanto on volcanic stones; tunu ahi, tuna cooked on a hot stone; po’e, a sweet banana or pumpkin cake |
For the far south in more depth, read our Patagonia food and drink guide.
On Chiloé Island the signature meal is cooked in the ground. For a curanto en hoyo, cooks lay hot stones in a pit, pile on shellfish, fish, meat, potatoes and vegetables, and cover it all with big nalca or pangue leaves to hold the steam. On top go milcao, patties of grated and mashed potato with pork cracklings, and chapalele, a dumpling of potato and flour. Chile’s tourism board calls it a social event more than a meal, with roots in the Mapuche people.
In Castro and Dalcahue, food tours let you help cook a curanto.
Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc get Chile onto wine lists abroad. Carmenère is the better story.
It was a Bordeaux grape, all but lost there when phylloxera tore through Europe’s vineyards. But cuttings had reached Chile by the mid-1800s, where they were planted as Merlot, and for more than a hundred years nobody noticed. On November 24, 1994, the French ampelographer Jean-Michel Boursiquot walked a “Merlot” vineyard at Carmen in the Maipo Valley and told the winemaker it was a different grape entirely. Some of the best Carmenère (often written Carmenere) now comes from Peumo in the Cachapoal Valley and Apalta in the Colchagua Valley.
The Maipo Valley, under an hour from Santiago by car, is known for Cabernet Sauvignon. The Casablanca Valley, 72 km out between the coastal range and the Pacific, makes Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. Colchagua carries as much international prestige as any valley in the country. Pick one and give it a full day. Four wineries in an afternoon is a blur, not a tasting.
Our Santiago & Puerto Varas Wineries Tour pairs Casablanca and Colchagua with the Lake District. The Best of Chilean Wines Tour stays near Santiago, in the Maipo and San Antonio valleys.
Before you leave Chile, try a Pisco Sour. The Chilean version blends pisco with lemon juice (Pica lemons if the bar has them), powdered sugar and egg white over crushed ice.
Then the awkward part, the name. Chile and Peru both make a grape brandy called pisco, and both protect the name by law. Chile reserved it in 1931 for spirits distilled in a northern zone around Huasco and Elqui; today its legal pisco zone is the Atacama and Coquimbo regions. Peru’s denomination of origin, its first, dates from 1990 and covers the coasts of Lima, Ica, Arequipa, Moquegua and Tacna. Each country considers pisco its own. We leave that argument to them and suggest you taste both, ideally not on the same night.
The other famous drinks are less diplomatic. A terremoto (“Earthquake”) is pipeño, a plain white wine from non-noble grapes, poured over pineapple ice cream with a splash of fernet or grenadine. The name is a fair warning. In summer the central valleys drink mote con huesillo: dried peaches stewed in cinnamon and chancaca syrup, served ice-cold over cooked wheat.
Plan at least one evening around once, Chile’s teatime. Somewhere between 5 and 7 p.m., tea or coffee comes out with bread (marraqueta, hallulla or homemade pan amasado), cheese, ham, mashed avocado, tomato or scrambled eggs, and something sweet such as kuchen. Half snack, half meal.
Nobody agrees on the name. Once means “eleven,” and Marca Chile, Chile’s official country-brand agency, lists three theories: the British “elevenses,” a group of eleven women, and saltpeter workers’ code for aguardiente, a word of eleven letters. Pick the one you like.
For the sweet side, learn manjar, Chile’s name for dulce de leche: whole milk and sugar cooked slowly until thick. Chilean alfajores sandwich it between rounds of pastry.
Tipping. Chilean law (Ley 20.729, 2014) requires restaurants, bars, cafés and similar places with table service to suggest a tip of at least 10 percent on the bill. The propina is paid unless you say you do not want it. More on our money in Chile page.
Shellfish. Chile’s Ministry of Health asks people to buy and eat shellfish only where the health authority has authorized the sale, because red tide toxins can build up in shellfish. Fish are not affected. Skip collecting your own.
Water and vaccines. The CDC recommends the hepatitis A vaccine for unvaccinated travelers to Chile, and says to consider typhoid vaccination for areas with poor sanitation or stays of a month or more. For tap water and other health questions, see staying healthy in Chile. For menu Spanish, our languages of Chile guide helps.
Do not plan a food trip. Plan a Chile trip and eat properly along the way: curanto in Chiloé, king crab in Punta Arenas, Carmenère close to its vines. Start with our Chile food and wine tours, or ask us for a custom Chile itinerary built around the meals you care about. Everything else starts in our Chile travel guide.
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