![]() ![]() Guzmán had the dreamy, doomed look of a duellist (or, as more than one woman in the audience pointed out, of Johnny Depp). At Boragó, his restaurant in Santiago, he uses mostly indigenous ingredients, relying on more than two hundred foragers and small producers to supply the raw materials for dishes such as venison tartare with maqui berries and a soup of Patagonian rainwater served on a bed of moss. Rodolfo Guzmán, a chef from Chile, ascended the stage to collect the Chefs’ Choice Award. “Now, in Mexico, we have a policy for culinary diplomacy.” “We believe that Peru has made more efforts,” a government official at one of the tables remarked, of the P.R. The lights went down, and a video extolling the gastronomy of Mexico began. “You have to do new things all the time, you have to focus on the food, you have to talk to the press.” “You have to work like crazy,” a chef told a reporter. “It’s very difficult to get on the list, and it’s very difficult to get off,” an event planner said to a restaurant consultant. (Seeking to extend the brand, in 2013 the World’s 50 Best Restaurants launched separate lists for Asia and Latin America.) Everyone talked through the presentation, but the furious networking only heightened the excitement. Onstage, the host was announcing the winners in descending order. The chefs ran the restaurants, which the journalists wrote about, promoting the businesspeople’s interests, so that they plowed more money into the chefs’ projects, which yielded fodder for the journalists. The guests were drawn mainly from three constituencies: chefs, journalists, and businesspeople-a triad that thrived as interdependently as corn, beans, and squash. It listed Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram information and a hashtag, #LatAm50Best.The password for the 50 Best Wi-Fi network was Mexico2015, which had the advantage of being both dryly factual and sounding like a tourist-board come-on. Inside the program, the event’s organizers, the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, had enclosed a card. Water sommeliers-white tie, white gloves, wearing tasting cups on silver chains-circulated with magnums of San Pellegrino. The Modelo stand was manned by a team of studs in suspenders. There were a multitude of bars: wine by Robert Mondavi, tequila by Casa Dragones, rum by Zacapa, champagne by Veuve Clicquot. The party was meant to be attended with a drink in one hand, a phone in the other. In the colonnaded courtyard of the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, a former Jesuit boarding school in Mexico City, under a grove of magnolia trees hung with punched-tin stars, more than five hundred people had gathered to learn which restaurants would be proclaimed the fifty best in Latin America. “I have friends who are smart, interesting guys who lose their shit over getting No. ![]()
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