Chile Forum

My experience is in the north, AND vegetarian too, so I can't comment on the seafood and meat.
First, search this forum. The topic of food has been covered many, many times and there are also some reviews of restaurants on the forum.
This blogger also does reviews of restaurants in the Santiago region and might have some interesting tips.
http://www.emilyinchile.com/

In the north, unfortunately eating out is almost impossible for me, as a vegetarian. I do keep trying and have found food ranging from completely inedible to halfway decent. When we have traveled, north or south, we end up having to eat hot chips, bread and avocado, fruit and maybe pizza.

My experience of Chilean home cooking has been that it's very salty and very oily, for my tastes. I don't know if this is a general Chile thing, but my mother in law has a tendency to massively overcook veges and then drown them in lemon and salt, which basically turns them almost inedible. "Salads" consist of a single vege, either overcooked with lemon (eg broccoli or cauliflower), or raw and cut up (a plate of lettuce, or tomato, or cucumber).

The Hare Krishna's have a few places they sell food. In New Zealand I used to go to a Hare Krishna yoga class because they served food afterwards and it was really really good. Here unfortunately, instead of an indian influence in their cooking, they make chilean dishes with soy meat or gluten. So completos, hamburgers, pizza etc. They are pretty disgusting, BUT the Hare Krishna's do make really good bread.

In terms of raw ingredients, here in Antofagasta it's not great. I guess that is unsurprising, since it's the middle of the desert. You cannot get fresh milk or cream, and the cheese selection is very limited. The nice cheese is imported and very expensive, although Chile does have some nice goats cheeses. Eggs are all battery farmed, nothing free range available.
Fruit and veg is ok, but not brilliant. The organic range is very very limited. The actual range of veges available in the supermarket or in the vega is also very small. For example, the tomatoes are generally long life tomatoes that have no flavour at all, and other varieties are very rarely available. Fruit comes and goes depending on the season, and if you happen to get it fresh, can be very good (peaches, nectarines and apricots right now). We have just moved into a house and I can finally have a small vege garden. We've just started eating the lettuce out of the garden and the difference in taste from what you can get in the store is huge. As someone said above, Chile uses a lot of pesticides and herbicides, so i'm keen to grown what I can myself.

There are lots of comments about coffee on this forum too.... in Antofagasta i've found a couple of places that serve decent coffee (single shot espresso), but it's hot and miss. Loads of places have espresso machines, but most don't actually know how to use them.

Other ingredients for home cooking are hot and miss. Chile seems to add lots of additional things to flour and pasta for example (vitamins, minerals etc). Me, i'd prefer to just eat well, and get all the vitamins and minerals I need from a balanced diet, but from what i've seen, that's pretty hard to do here since additives are in the basic ingredients like flour. Other things I've had a hard time finding are a variety of (dried) beans .... there are about 4 or 5 they sell and nothing else. Many spices can be hard to find, so home cooking CAN be done, but it can be limited.

All these things might be different down south, especially being able to find better fruit and veg. I'm from the country in New Zealand, so i'm used to lots more organic food, and lots more buying direct from the farmer. Chile in my view is limited in it's food cultivation and preparation.

I also have not managed to find very many wines that I love, but I plan to keep sampling!

All in all, Chile is an interesting country, but it's not really a choice for food tourism. Maybe, hopefully that can change. You could say the same about New Zealand 25 years ago (bland, tasteless horrible food with no variety and nescafe coffee), and that has completely changed now.

For food experiences I would go to Italy, Thailand or even Australia (lots of food from all over the world, try Melbourne). Remember that's a vegetarian perspective.... many other places I have been to have been amazing, but as a vegetarian I ended up eating lots of cheese sandwhiches (eg Spain).