How Parrilla Don Julio Helped a Neglected Buenos Aires Square Bloom

(Fine Dining Lovers) It’s a warm autumnal afternoon in Buenos Aires, ash leaves dot the pavement and sun streams between the mid-rise buildings in the hip barrio of Palermo. At Huerta Luna de Enfrente, a sustainable urban community allotment, a small group of green-fingered neighbours are taking advantage of the amiable weather to transplant seedlings into 30-cubic-metre vegetable […]

Meet Latin America’s Leading Female Chefs

(Fine Dining Lovers) Well ahead of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants awards revealing its 2020 rankings, the stage had been set to be the year of the female chef. First up was Janaina Rueda of Bar de Dona Onça and A Casa do Porco in São Paulo, who picked up the Icon award; the much-coveted Chefs’ Chef prize went to Leo Espinosa of Restaurante LEO in Bogotá; Narda Lepes of Narda Comedor in Buenos […]

How a Humble Steakhouse Became the Best Restaurant in Latin America

(Fine Dining Lovers) It was a precocious 20-year-old Pablo Rivero who threw the few savings he had, along with backing from his grandmother and father, into a humble parrilla (steakhouse) that opened in a sketchy Buenos Aires ‘hood shortly before Argentina’s most devastating economic crisis unleashed its turmoil in 2001.  Today, Parrilla Don Julio tops the bucket list of almost every […]

Sowing a potato revolution in the Andes

(Atlas of the Future) Few chefs have the vision and skill to sow 223 varieties of native potatoes on their Andean restaurant’s high-altitude farmland, replicating the efforts of a neighbouring Inca agricultural research centre with a contemporary model in order to improve tuber genetics while collaborating with two indigenous communities. But Virgilio Martínez is doing […]

Meet the Peruvian farmer who turns potatoes into ‘wine’

(Fine Dining Lovers) Born to potato farmers in Peru’s Cusco region, Manuel Choqque Bravo’s playground was the fertile Andean land where his family cultivated tubers at 3,740 metres above sea level. He’d while away days in the field, terrorising his younger siblings with strange-looking potatoes such as pumaqmaquin (Quechua for puma’s paw) or snacking on potato leaves and […]