Rodolfo Guzmán is the chef of Boragó in Santiago, Chile. I interviewed him for The Luxury of Attention.
Of all the chefs I spoke with, Guzmán took the path of staying true more visibly than anyone. He chose, deliberately, to build a kitchen around indigenous Chilean ingredients at a time when serious dining in Chile was oriented toward European fashion. When I asked what keeps his team motivated, his answer was curiosity. Year after year the kitchen has been discovering what Chilean cuisine can be by finding ingredients that grow only in Chile, and he describes the team as being in a permanent state of discovery.
“Year after year, out of sheer curiosity, we have been discovering the possibilities of Chilean cuisine by finding very unique ingredients only grown in our country. We are constantly in discovery mode.” Rodolfo Guzmán, chef, Boragó
He was equally honest with me about what the choice cost. At the beginning there was very little attention on the food, the hospitality, the service or the discovery of native ingredients. For the first six years the restaurant was empty. Chileans did not know it existed, largely because no one wrote about it. The book does not soften that. Six years of an empty dining room, in service of a kitchen rooted in place, is a real cost and the risk was never theoretical. The path eventually produced one of the highest ranked restaurants in Latin America, and the identity Guzmán built is now the restaurant’s most durable asset. Had he compromised during the empty years, the market would have ignored the result just as completely, and there would have been no reward at the end.
In the book, Rodolfo Guzmán appears in Chapter 11, Staying True, where his account opens the chapter’s argument that a brand is what a property is, repeated daily, and where the six empty years at Boragó stand as the chapter’s plainest statement that staying true costs something before it pays.
“For the first six years, the restaurant was empty. Chileans did not even know we existed, mainly because we were never written about.” Rodolfo Guzmán, chef, Boragó