Chile Forum

RG1981 wrote: it's not even pizza anymore...just some kind of bread, cheese, and crap salad.

Every once in a while a foreigner will figure out of way to produce a halfway decent pizza in Chile. There is a Swiss woman in Puerto Natales who set up a shop, La Mesita Grande, that is almost always packed and profitable during the tourist season. Packed with foreigners. It's no New York pizza -- more like something you would find in northern Italy -- and way too thin to be really great pizza, but the flavours are good.

There are two other pizza shops very close by. One would think that the popularity of La Mesita Grande would cause those other shops to consider some emulation, to get in on the tourism trade, to experiment with the concept of flavour. But no. Oregano would surely be the death of us all. A "pizza with tuna" is pretty daring here, and it's made with cat-food-grade fish particles. The local palate would be outraged by anything that was not hopelessly bland. There are only two legally allowable spices, and they call them condimentos here: Ketchup, and ají.

The cheese is so bland because there is no demand for strong cheeses. That said I find lots of goat cheese and artisanal cheese from the south in the various ferias I go to for other food. I only enter Jumbo for Cranberry juice and Schweppes tonic water, and sadly both are often sold out ;(

Schweppes tonic water - I only get the tiny little cans here, so have switched to Canada dry. Hmmmm... G&T