AD: Are ingredients that you explore and combine through CIB to discover new flavors?
RG: Yes, no doubt. We have already discovered things that we never imagined we were going to discover. Only 12 years ago an ingredient meant a single possibility, today a Chilean ingredient means at least 300 possibilities. It is as if you were a painter who paints with 25 colors and they give you a box with 300 colors, you literally live a rebirth. That happened to us.
AD: You were highlighted among the 10 best chef in the world for your capacity for innovation, what inspires you to do it?
RG: I am immensely honest, I never imagined that they were going to choose me. I am very gratitude for making visible Chile, our gastronomy. As a cook, what inspires me most is the Chilean ancestral culture, the former inhabitants who lived thousands of years ago. The territory also inspires me, because I am lucky to live in a place that is very different, not only to the rest of the world, but to the rest of the region. I am deeply proud to be Chilean.
AD: What have you learned from the kitchen of the original peoples?
RG: We introduced two things in Boragó that they are fundamental in our work as a restaurant: classify and categorize. We classify and categorize the complete Chilean territory. It is not we wanted to do it from the beginning, but we had the desire, the passion and the debauchery of learning as quickly as possible. This is how we ended up writing down things so that we would not forget a season for another. In this learning path we learned from farmers, from different native peoples, anthropologists, biologists, botanists.
What is very much in vogue today, we begin in 2006. We begin to link, to travel intensely through Chile to understand and know from close, to look at it, touch it, breathe it. We learned that there are three things that are very different and that are usually confused: technique, elaborations and cooking methods. There are three radically different things that many times cross and that have allowed us to understand and learn about our original peoples. What has impacted us most are its cooking methods and its elaborations. This gave us stood to exacerbate two things that are immensely important to us: imagination and originality.
The Boragó menu changes according to the stations, with an approach in the Kilometer Zero kitchen.Courtesy boragó