The Bizarre Truth (28 page)

As strange as piure is, the item that sticks out most in my mind for sheer hedonistic eating pleasure is picoroco. This tubelike barnacle looks more like a mini volcano than food. Throw these puppies on the grill and they essentially cook in their own shell. Ideally, you can place the shells directly on the coals underneath the grate. Once cooked, poke inside the barnacle and you’ll find a white piece of meat that looks like a crab claw but tastes like lobster. You can eat this straight out of the shell, but often picoroco is found in soups. A bowl of cold, tomato gazpacho filled with pieces of steamed picoroco is one of the most refreshing dishes you’ll find on a hot day. Word to the wise: Don’t hover over the grill too much if you are roasting them fresh—these little treats often become so hot that they explode … with seawater, pieces of barnacle, and hot shell spewing all over the place. Dodging a geyser of boiling hot barnacle liquid isn’t exactly the most comforting thing in the world, but it adds a sense of danger to the eating experience, which I like.

With access to such fresh and abundant ingredients, it’s not surprising Santiago offers incredible dining. The influx of Mapuche Indian and European influences shapes Santiago’s highly regarded restaurant scene. From fine dining to street food, this city’s got it covered, and I can’t recommend a destination as one of my all-time faves without talking about some of my best-loved restaurants. If you ever visit Santiago, please stop at Astrid Y Gaston, a Peruvian restaurant that originated in Lima but opened a branch in Santiago. It is considered one of the best, if not
the
best,
restaurants in the city. It has the most amazing ambience paired with delicacies like tuna with spicy honey glaze and crab ravioli—really cool, quirky dishes with bold, fresh flavors. If molecular gastronomy is your thing, Puerto Fuy blew my mind. Each dish that arrives at your table is a work of art, leaving you wondering if you should look at it or eat it. And the lunch I had at Opera, often considered one of the top restaurants in the world, was simply elegant. Now,
there
is a kitchen with an extremely refined skill set.

While I love these world-renowned establishments, none of them really seemed to capture the true heart and soul of Chilean cuisine. Enter Picada Ana Maria, a humble little restaurant off Santiago’s beaten path. It started out as a picada—Chile-speak for a restaurant that serves simple, inexpensive meals. But its popularity prompted the owners to break out the tablecloths and open a full-service restaurant. Run by Ana Maria Zuniga, this charming restaurant is located on the first floor of her home. A tiny sign hangs outside the building, telling patrons they must first ring a doorbell to be let in. It feels less like entering a restaurant and more like going to a friend’s house for a dinner party.

Ana Maria won’t disclose how long she’s been cooking, but she’s probably in her fifties, looks forty, and refuses to put her kitchen in the hands of anyone else. We ate eight or nine dishes there that were just spectacular. One in particular was the roasted partridge in a rosemary and honey sauce. While Ana serves some fantastic salads and meat dishes, she’s earned a reputation for serving incredible seafood, specializing in abalone.

Abalone are giant sea snails that live in thick shells adhered to rocks, usually in cold waters. Harvesting this meal is not an agreeable task. You have to sink into icy water equipped with a heavy iron bar to pry the abalone from the rock. Interestingly, this mollusk doesn’t naturally grow in Chile, yet their aquaculture there is rapidly developing as a top industry. Chile is currently the fifth-largest producer of cultured abalone in the world, with 304 tons harvested in 2006.

When it comes to food preparation, abalone is known for its stubbornness and tough texture. Much like octopus, it’s a type of dish best eaten raw, or you’ll have to cook the heck out of it. Anything in between is inedible. Some chefs will tenderize it first, beating the meat over and over to break the muscle down. You can easily get carried away using a mallet and cutting board to tenderize the abalone, but you risk losing product or damaging the flesh. Ana Maria has developed a unique method I had never encountered before. First, after placing five or six small fist-size pieces of abalone into a rubber tube, one of her prep cooks takes the ends as you’d hold a jump rope and smashes the tube on a cement sidewalk behind the kitchen. It’s genius: The abalone doesn’t go anywhere, because the centrifugal force keeps the animals in place. The amount of power delivered through the reverberation tenderizes the muscle in just a few smashes. Next, the abalone are cleaned, trimmed, washed, and steamed. I tasted them cold and poached with a homemade lemon mayonnaise. These were easily the most tender abalone I’ve ever tried—definitely worth the flight to Santiago all on its own.

I also sampled two versions of Ana Maria’s pink razor clams. Until this trip, I’d seen them only in Japanese restaurants. Housed in an ovaloid, triangular shell with rounded edges, the clam is a beautiful pale pink color; one corner of the muscle is almost a fiery red, and the hue recedes into a gentle pink as the flesh goes deeper inside the apex of the shell. I ate them raw on the half shell with lemon, olive oil, and a bit of minced vegetable, as well as pan roasted with white wine, garlic, and parsley. A simple, light, and delicious combination.

It’s almost impossible to find a bad meal in Chile—with ingredients that fresh, meals need little fooling around with. The country’s ultimate seafood spot might be the town of Valparaiso. The actual city is a huge and industrial affair, outfitted with one of the largest port systems in the Southern Hemisphere. However, a
short drive outside the city brings you to little fishing villages like Quintay, where you can watch boats coming into sleepy little coves carrying their seafood to local restaurants. Luckily, in Valparaiso, there are many young chefs who pride themselves on their commitment to local food. The best conger eel I ate the whole week came from a little restaurant there called Café Urriola. Six seats, one chef, huge props. I’ve said it before, and I will certainly say it again: If seafood is your thing, Chile has got to be your country.

I am nearly as wild about pork as I am seafood. To me, pork preparation is an art form. However, with something so widely consumed around the world, it’s hard to say that one bite of pig is any better than another.

I’ve experienced some really special porky goodness on a global scale, and it seems there is no shortage of ways to prepare this delicious creature. In Cuba, I enjoyed a pig finished with palmiche, the little fruits of the royal palm tree. I’ve dined on suckling pigs roasted to perfection in a 300-year-old Madrid restaurant. I gorged myself on wild boar hunted down by Samoan tribesmen and buried with hot rocks covered with scraps of lamb fat for basting. The memory of whole roasted Kahlua pigs, cooked at a traditional Hawaiian luau underneath giant hot lava rocks, and pulpy pounded roots of coconut palms could never be wiped from my mind. These huge globs of vegetal matter dripped their sugary sap onto the heated rocks, which in turn gave the meat a sweet caramel flavor that has never been replicated in my book.

Pork barbecue occupies a whole different realm in the annals of swine artistry. So many cities are renowned for their special style of barbecue. The Memphis in May Barbecue Championship is the United States’ pinnacle ’cue event, a time when the whole city becomes ground zero for the world’s greatest barbecue talent. Kansas City may be considered the barbecue capital of the world,
with biggies like Danny’s Eat-It and Beat-It, Earl’s Quick, Gates’, Arthur Bryant’s, and Jack’s Stack, to name a few of my faves, all fighting for top honors in a city built on pork and beef BBQ.

However, not one of these incredible experiences will ever measure up to my personal favorite. It didn’t come from Hawaii, Samoa, Vietnam, Spain, or any of the swine-centric hot spots around the globe. Surprisingly enough, it’s the Puerto Ricans who make all other pork-worshiping cultures seem tame by comparison.

The Puerto Rican hillside village of Guavate serves as an epicenter of pork meals. Located an hour-and-a-half drive outside of San Juan on PR-184, known colloquially as the Pork Highway, Guavate is a great example of my theory that venturing out to the last stop on the subway is the best way to find the best foods, leaving the tourist traps in the dust and opening your mind to a more honest and authentic experience. Most of the time the reward is just a better meal, some smug satisfaction, and a better story when you get back home—at a minimum. In Guavate I expected a little neighborhood with a couple of restaurants. Instead, I discovered a Puerto Rican village that lives and breathes lechon asado, roasted whole pig. On a Sunday afternoon, you share the pilgrimage to this pork mecca with hundreds of Puerto Ricans and clued-in tourists alike, who dine on the area’s specialty and dance away the afternoon and evening to live salsa music.

Guavate restaurateurs are evangelical when it comes to the pig. In no place was this more evident than at El Rancho Original. This lechoneria has spent generations perfecting the lechon asado process. They finish the pigs on an orange, nut, and fruit diet. Once the animals are slaughtered, they are placed on giant wood-fired and wood-assist rotisseries, then turned for hours until every single piece of the animal is perfectly cooked. Back in the day, the restaurant’s reputation caused quite a stir throughout Puerto Rico and other Guavate restaurateurs cashed in, opening their own eateries along the same dusty little main street.

Today, about a dozen lechonerias line the street, serving food cafeteria-style. Grab a tray and select a cut: pork belly, pork ribs, pork shoulder, pork chops, cheeks, ears, tails, hocks, and cracklings. The quality of the meat is fantastic—sweet, succulent, sticky, and fatty. The availability of so many different parts of the pig was the most exciting aspect of the meal. Any pig part is fair game, and you can pick a little bit of everything if sample platters are to your liking. The chefs simply place pig quarters on wooden chopping blocks. All you have to do is point to the piece you want. If they’re running low, no sweat, they’ll just grab another hog from the back. They are cooking them nonstop in a hell-bent pig-heaven tribute to your waistline expansion. As fast as people can line up and fill their tray, the BBQers just keep cooking up and slicing pig. In fact, at Christmastime, some of the restaurants have been known to go through nearly seventy pigs in a single day, each weighing in at roughly 100 pounds. Of course, no Latin meal would be complete without fresh and plentiful sides. Beans, rice, cooked greens, yucca with garlic mojo, fried plantains—you name it, you get it alongside your pork.

Pick a spot under an open, breezy shelter created to protect diners from rain or the blazing sun, and plant yourself with your tray. Grab a napkin and dig in. On Saturdays and Sundays, salsa bands perform while people eat, dance, and chat the day away. As rich and filling as the lechon asado is, the dancing certainly helps burn it off. Take a few bites of pork shoulder, get up and dance three or four numbers, sit back down, splash a little more chili sauce onto your barbecued pig, take a few more bites, and repeat. Oddly, while there are dozens of lechonerias to choose from, everyone is at El Rancho. You would think the competition is fierce, but it’s a one-horse town as far as I am concerned.

Unless you’re eating a whole little baby pig suckling by yourself, you’ll never have the opportunity to sample so many flavors on one plate. The rich and fatty belly is so much more toothsome than
the leaner, luxury cuts like the chops. Compare that to the earthiness of the legs or to the way-too-rich-for-your-own-good cheeks. There’s no doubt in my mind—if I had to eat pork in one place, it would be in the little hillside town of Guavate, Puerto Rico.

Beverages often provide a pleasant surprise. In Bolivia, I sampled peanut juice for the first time, something that I don’t recommend to anybody. I’ve sipped aloe tonic in Otavalo, Ecuador, and went through a struggle of grand proportions to keep that down in my system. It’s a nasty, bitter liquid filled with six ounces of jelly scraped from giant reeds of aloe root. I couldn’t even get it down. At one point I had a sticky, goo-like strand that attached from the pit of my stomach into a glass that held the elixir. At that point, I almost lost it. I politely explained to the lovely aloe vendor that her drink must be an acquired taste, then quickly pawned it off on an elderly woman, who chugged the entire glass down in a matter of seconds. I don’t know what fraternity taught her that skill, but this grandma earned major points in my book.

I love kvass, a drink they practically give away on the streets of St. Petersburg. Called baby beer by the locals, this near-nonalcoholic beer is made with rye bread, and everyone from kids to the eighty-year-old nanas drink it. The Russians have a very strange relationship with alcohol. Public drunkenness is not socially unacceptable; in fact, it seems to be encouraged, considering the number of times booze is brought to the table in bottles for all to enjoy. Kvass seems to be like booze with training wheels for the Russians.

I’ve had more types of chicha poured into a cup and thrown my way than I could ever begin to count. It seems every Latin American, South American, Caribbean, and many African countries make their own version. Chicha is essentially a puree of water and some type of root vegetable, usually cassava or yucca. The drink is mildly alcoholic because it sits and ferments, maybe one one-thousandth of a percent, and is extremely fortifying, supplying
a lot of healthful benefits from a probiotic standpoint. From a psychological standpoint, I find a lot of these drinks challenging. I’ve seen families literally chew two or three pounds of root vegetables, spitting the wet, mashed, masticated by-product into a giant pot of water where it begins to slowly ferment. Families graciously offer you a glass of their homemade brew. At the end of a long, hot day, downing a glass of this stuff sounds like the last thing I want to do. However, no one ever said sharing food and experiencing culture is automatically easy, and with each brain-cramp-inducing gulp, I just chalk it up to a hard day at the office.