Food guide
Eating Chile: Completos, Coastal Seafood and Once
Chile's food culture sits somewhat apart from its famous wine — a country built along a coastline eats a great deal of seafood, keeps a genuine street-food tradition centred on one particular hot dog, and closes the day not with dinner but with a light early-evening meal borrowed loosely from British teatime. The Colchagua Valley, Maipo and Casablanca carry the wine story in depth; what follows is what Chileans actually eat day to day.
Updated 2026-08-16
The Completo and Chilean Street Food
The completo — Chile's take on the hot dog — is less a snack than a small national institution, piled so high with toppings that the sausage itself nearly disappears: a completo italiano carries mashed avocado, tomato and a thick layer of mayonnaise (the colours supposedly echoing the Italian flag), while other versions add sauerkraut, chili sauce or ketchup in different combinations. Street carts and dedicated fuente de soda diners serve them constantly, and ordering one is a genuine everyday act rather than a tourist novelty. Alongside it, the empanada de pino — a pastry filled with chopped beef, onion, a hard-boiled egg slice, a raisin and an olive, baked rather than fried — is the other standard street and bakery staple, sold everywhere from bus terminals to beachfront stalls.
Chorrillana, a heaped plate of french fries topped with fried onions, strips of beef and fried eggs, began as a Valparaíso port-town dish meant for sharing over drinks and has since spread to bars across the country — usually ordered for a table rather than as an individual meal. Pastel de choclo, a baked corn-and-beef pie with a sweet-savoury golden crust, is the closest thing to a Chilean home-cooking classic, traditionally made in late summer when fresh corn is at its best.
Seafood Along a 4,000-Kilometre Coast
With one of the longest coastlines of any country, Chile's seafood culture runs the length of the mainland rather than concentrating in one region. Congrio, a firm white conger-eel commemorated in a Pablo Neruda poem dedicated to its stew, is a national favourite, alongside ceviche made with white fish cured in lime, and mariscal, a cold shellfish soup-salad loaded with clams, mussels and crab. Santiago's Mercado Central and its counterparts in Valparaíso and coastal towns are the classic places to eat it fresh, typically at counter stalls surrounded by the day's catch rather than at a conventional restaurant table. This is a distinct tradition from the earth-oven curanto found on Chiloé island, native to Chiloé and Los Lagos — mainland Chilean seafood is generally simpler preparations built around the fish itself.
Once: the Evening Meal That Isn't Dinner
Once (pronounced ON-say, literally “eleven”) is a light early-evening meal that functions as many Chileans' equivalent of dinner, typically taken between five and eight in the evening around bread, cold cuts, avocado, cheese and a pot of tea — a custom with disputed origins, one popular story holding that it began as a coded reference to drinking aguardiente, whose name has eleven letters. Kuchen, the German-influenced fruit cake found throughout the Lake District, is a common once accompaniment nationwide, not just in the south. On a hot day, mote con huesillo — a cold drink of husked wheat and dried peach in its own sweet syrup — is sold from street carts as an alternative to the tea-based version.