By The Best Chef NEW CANDIDATES Top100 2022 Comments Off

Pedro Bargero

CHILA

Unlike many of the great chefs who began their relationship with cooking in their childhoods, sitting on stools in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ kitchens, Pedro Bargero felt no interest at all in gastronomy until he was 20 years old, when the need to do something with his hands, combined with a deep longing for traveling, resulted in him applying to cooking classes.

The discovery of a true passion for products, flavors and techniques

Suddenly the Cooking School arrived, the first jobs and, quickly, the discovery of a passion for good food and fine dining that earned him a scholarship, a position in the kitchen of CHILA –at that time in charge of Sole Nardelli– and a series of trips that led him to work in France with Mauro Colagreco and David Toutain.

He then returned to CHILA, this time as Head Chef, and a year later he returned to Europe, working everywhere and learning from the culinary cultures of the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and Russia. When Andrés Porcel, founder of CHILA, asked him at the end of 2016 if he would be interested in taking the helm of CHILA, Pedro interrupted everything and came back once more.

A revolutionary force whose singularity shapes CHILA’S identity

Pedro brings the products he works with to life by using them in new and disruptive ways, playing with texture, taste, color and perfume while designing surprising and unpredictable experiences for his diners. He takes risks and reinvents himself based on the products he works with, treating an almond as if it were the most luxurious of truffles. Pedro is a revolutionary force whose singularity shapes CHILA’S identity one chapter at a time.

CHILA’s cuisine

The territory is, in fact, one of the biggest playfields of CHILA’s cuisine, and over the years the restaurant has rather inadvertently created a unique map of Argentina’s regions with each of Pedro’s menus or chapters. This map takes the country for its climates rather than its geographical boundaries, and allows the earth, the minerals, the water, the plants and the proteins to enter the menus and dishes in new flavor compositions that create a sort of biome, one that goes beyond the food and becomes a whole with the wine, the service, the flatware and the music. In that ecosystem, an almond is as valuable as the most expensive caviar, and the sea and mountain can have the closest of relationships.