There’s a common idea that a meal at the best restaurants should come with a side order of drama. Dinner served up from a theatrically pretentious menu perhaps, or from a red-faced celebrity chef shouting orders at his harassed crew. They certainly don’t come from a remote cabin that looks like a fisherman’s shack and has a kitchen so simple that you’d imagine that even rustling up an omelette in it might be a challenge.
But travel is all about confounding expectations, and that’s how I found myself perched on the counter at Alma Yagan in Tierra del Fuego, contemplating a serving of mushroom and chocolate ice cream. It could only have been more Alice in Wonderland if it had come with a label that said, ‘Eat me.’ My host Diana Mendez watched as I raised the spoon and then asked me gently, ‘What do you think, Danny?’
Ushuaia: Seafood heaven
Taking a trip to Ushuaia is a great way of dispelling the greatest myth about Argentinian food: that every meal starts and ends with a juicy steak. The gaucho and his cow certainly remain a staple of Argentinian identity, but the nation’s food culture is about so much more, whether that’s from Argentina’s strong Italian roots or that fact that as many as one Argentinian in 12 today describes themselves as a vegetarian or vegan. And in Ushuaia, it’s seafood that dominates the menu.
The cold waters of the Beagle Channel that runs along the southern edge of Tierra del Fuego abound in marine life. The local fishing fleet specialises in enormous king crabs and fat green mussels, destined for the city’s restaurants. Better yet, they also catch the wild salmon that still run here, scoffing derisively at neighbouring Chile’s salmon farming industry that they say has had a ruinous effect on local ecosystems.
To learn more about the local food scene I headed 90 minutes east of Ushuaia to the fishing village of Puerto Almanza on Swoop’s Best of Tierra del Fuego tour, for lunch at Alma Yagan restaurant.
Hidden treasures
Alma Yagan is perhaps one of the most unassuming places I’ve ever eaten a meal. When we pulled off the road, I wasn’t even sure if we’d arrived. A simple path of rough-hewn planks led through a forest of lenga trees, until we could see the Beagle Channel stretch out before us. Peeping through them was a green tin-roofed shack. It was adorned with fishing nets, rope and driftwood. Next to the cabin was a simple wooden platform extending out over a pebbly beach, with a rough branch serving as a flagpole for the national colours. It looked as if the entire building had accidentally washed ashore one morning.
In finer weather, we’d have sat out on the platform for lunch, but Patagonian weather being what it is, we were happy to discover that the cabin’s gently smoking chimney promised a warm fire to sit around. And Patagonian hospitality also being what it is, someone had already opened a nice bottle of red wine to enjoy next to it.
As we drank our wine and warmed ourselves, our host Diana explained how the restaurant had come to be. Only a counter separated where we would eat from where she was preparing our meal in the most unflustered way imaginable, only breaking off every now and then to illustrate a point by gesturing to an old photo on the wall or through the window to the Beagle Channel.
Diana was born about as far away from Tierra del Fuego as it’s possible to get, in the sticky heat of Corriente near the Paraguay border. She was drawn south by the promise of snow, and stayed when she met her husband here. After captaining her own fishing boat for a few years, she opened Alma Yagan to share her love of seafood and other local produce with others.
Lunch is served
The kitchen was a simple affair with walls of raw board and a single small stove, but the aromas that came from it were heavenly. The conversation broke up as the first of five courses arrived, each one plated up as delicately as if they had come from a Parisian gastronomy school. And all of them, Diana assured us, were based on ingredients that were caught or harvested within a couple of miles of where we were sat.
There was a starter of sea asparagus (samphire) soup, served in a bowl made by a local potter, with meaty slices of mushroom picked from the forest and with a dressing we poured from a seashell. There was a delicate trout ceviche and crab in a light broth, accompanied by fresh bread and – quite unexpectedly – thick green leaves of crispy kelp. Diana’s husband free dives to collect it by hand and often finds himself accompanied by sea lions as he dives among the kelp forests to collect it. In fact, he was out on his boat right now, she said, collecting mussels. Every day the menu was different: perhaps we’d like to come back again?
We all quickly agreed that we would. It all just seemed so incredibly unlikely. The cabin was tiny and at the end of a mysterious trail, but here we were wrapped up against the weather with a log fire eating a succession of dishes whose combinations of ingredients I could scarcely have imagined, created for us by a host who made her own home feel just like ours. Outside, the clouds sat low over the Beagle Channel, and I could just make out the distant lights of Puerto Williams on the far Chilean shore. But inside, everything was the essence of cosiness. Which is when Diana decided that we were ready to try her new ice cream.
Mushroom ice cream?
There hadn’t been a formal menu, but the last plates had already been cleared back when Diana asked if we might like to try a new recipe she’d been experimenting with. Would we be her guinea pigs?
A moment later, a tub appeared from a hidden freezer and Diana dug in with an ice cream scoop. This country has something of a sweet tooth: half of the economy of Bariloche in the Argentinian Lake District seems to revolve around chocolate shops, so I knew we were in good hands. A thick chocolate sauce was drizzled around a plate, and the ice cream was dressed with dandelion petals and mint. Only when I picked up the spoon did Diana tell me that the ice cream was made of mushrooms.
I’m not quite sure how to describe it. It definitely tasted like it had come from the woods – but not a rough earthy taste though, more like the comforting peaty scent of a forest floor, laced with smooth sweet cream.
Perhaps this was why Diana didn’t write her menus down: in her quiet and unassuming cabin, this was the element of drama that all the best restaurants have: not the bombast of a theatre, but the joy you get from close up magic: watching a friend casually shuffling a pack of cards in front of you, then laughing in wonder when they reach out and pull the ace from your top pocket.
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