Food · Chile

Chile: Food and the National Dish

A baked pastry eaten by the millions every Independence Day, an earth-oven feast from a southern archipelago, and a grape once thought extinct that turned out to be growing all along

By Worldlore Editorial · 30 September 2026

A baked corn casserole in a clay dish, beside a glass of a pale, frothy drink
Pastel de choclo from Pomaire, served alongside a terremoto — a Chilean cocktail of pipeño wine and pineapple ice cream, whose name means "earthquake." (Caathagtta / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

A long, narrow country with three climates on one plate

Chile stretches more than 4,300 kilometres from the Atacama Desert to Patagonian glaciers, and its food changes with the landscape: Andean and Aymara influence in the north, one of the world's great wine-growing valleys in the centre, and seafood, potatoes and earth-oven cooking in the wetter, cooler south. A long coastline fed by the cold Humboldt Current keeps fish and shellfish central everywhere, while the central valley's mild Mediterranean climate carries the corn, wheat and beef that show up in the country's best-known dishes.

The national dish: empanada de pino

Empanada de pino — a baked pastry filled with a mix of chopped beef, onion, a black olive, a piece of hard-boiled egg and a few raisins — is the dish most closely tied to Chilean identity, eaten year-round but especially around Fiestas Patrias, Chile's independence celebrations each September, when they are sold and eaten in huge numbers alongside asado and folk dancing. Pastel de choclo, a casserole of the same pino-style filling topped with a sweet corn crust and baked until golden, and cazuela, a clear soup of meat, potato, corn and pumpkin, are the other two dishes with a genuine claim to being Chile's culinary heart.

A large golden baked pastry on a plate
An empanada de pino at a restaurant in Pomaire, a town near Santiago — beef, onion, olive, raisin and hard-boiled egg baked inside a pastry shell. (J B / Wikimedia Commons)

Chiloé's earth oven

In the southern archipelago of Chiloé, curanto is cooked in a pit dug into the ground, lined with hot stones, and layered with shellfish, smoked meat, chicken, sausage and potato-based breads, all covered with nalca leaves and left to steam for about an hour — a version of the earth oven, a way of cooking found in many cultures, including across the Pacific.

A large mixed plate of shellfish, smoked meat, chicken, sausage and potato breads
Curanto from Isla Grande de Chiloé — shellfish, smoked meat, chicken, sausage and potato breads, traditionally cooked together in a pit lined with hot stones. (Renzo Disi / Wikimedia Commons)

Dishes to know

Five more to recognise across Chile:

  • Cazuela — a clear soup of meat, potato, corn and pumpkin, home cooking at

its most common.

  • Chorrillana — a huge shared plate of fries topped with fried egg, onion

and meat, most often credited to the J. Cruz restaurant in Valparaíso.

  • Completo — a Chilean hot dog piled high with toppings; the "Italiano"

version, with avocado, tomato and mayonnaise, echoes the colours of the Italian flag.

  • Caldillo de congrio — a conger eel soup celebrated in an ode by the

Nobel-winning poet Pablo Neruda.

  • Mote con huesillo — a cold summer drink and dessert of husked wheat and a

whole dried peach in sweet syrup, sold by street vendors.

A large plate piled with fries, fried egg, onion and meat
A chorrillana at J. Cruz in Valparaíso, the restaurant credited with inventing the dish — fries topped with fried egg, onion and meat, meant for sharing. (Osmar Valdebenito / Wikimedia Commons)

Wine, pisco and a grape that came back from the dead

A bottle of red wine labelled Carmenere on a table in Santiago
A bottle of Chilean Carménère in Santiago — a grape now closely associated with Chile, after decades of being mistaken for Merlot. (David Berkowitz / Wikimedia Commons)

Chile is also one of two countries, alongside Peru, that claims to have invented pisco and the pisco sour cocktail, a long-running and still unresolved regional dispute. Terremoto, mixing cheap pipeño wine with pineapple ice cream and grenadine, is one of the drinks most associated with Fiestas Patrias itself.

Eating as a traveller

Vegetarians can rely on cheese empanadas and Chile's excellent produce, though most of the classic dishes above are built around meat or seafood. Tap water is treated and generally considered safe in the cities. Onces, a light late-afternoon meal of bread and tea similar to British teatime, is a genuine daily habit worth joining if invited.

What to take from the table

An empanada de pino, eaten hot, is the place to start — and for a trip that reaches south to Chiloé, a proper curanto dug straight out of the ground is worth planning a whole day around.

Explore the destination