- A Journey to Patagonia
- Ultimate Fire-Cooking Experience
- Meet Your Host
“You don’t grow on a secure path. All of us should conquer something in life and it needs a lot of work and it needs a lot of risk. In order to grow and to improve, you have to be there a bit at the edge of uncertainty”
— FRANCIS MALLMANN —
A few times a year, Francis Mallmann opens his treasured Patagonian island home to host guests for a magical stay at “La Isla”. This is an unforgettable culinary journey with the ultimate Fire-Cooking experience. A journey led by Latin America’s top chef, in one of the most remote corners of Patagonia will guarantee to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
La Isla is a tiny snowy island that you could walk around in less than an hour and it is where Mallmann filmed his Netflix episode of Chef’s Table. The island is remote, lending to the idea to come here mainly to disconnect from today’s busy lives and have magical dining experiences of open-fire cooking, designed and executed personally by your host Francis Mallmann.
A Feast for All Senses, Surrounded by the Natural Landscapes & Wilderness of Patagonia.
Whether on a frozen lake, a forest or a shore surrounded by the magical landscapes of Patagonia, Chef Mallmann creates unique outdoor dining experiences for his guests. Experience daily open-fire cooking lessons, over custom made fire pits for 5 days with Francis personally.
It is here in Patagonia where Francis Mallmann connected with his roots and mastered the traditional Gaucho outdoors open-fire cooking, surrounded by the great outdoors and the majestic Andes Mountains.
Francis describes: “There are so many details because it’s such a fragile thing to cook with fires. People think it’s a beastly thing, it’s a manly thing… But it’s not! it’s extremely fragile.”
CELEBRITY CHEF, AUTHOR & RESTAURATEUR
Francis Mallmann (born 1956) is an Argentinian celebrity chef, author and restaurateur who specialises in various Patagonian methods of barbecuing food with open-fires. Without a doubt, Mallmann is South America’s most famous chef and he has been featured on numerous international television programmes, as well as on the Netflix original series Chef’s Table focusing on his life and cooking techniques.
After a career in gastronomy built on fine-dining French cuisine, Mallmann went back to his roots in the mid ’90s, learning local techniques from his childhood home of Patagonia and bringing them to the high-end food scene. Francis Mallmann is a man whose approach to cooking and living feels like a homage to a forgotten time and place. While many influential chefs around the world have engaged in an escalating competition to be as creative and forward-thinking in gastronomy as possible, Mallmann has swerved in the opposite direction, forsaking haute-cuisine. Mallmann instead is focusing on a primal style of hospitality whose core comes down to one-syllable words: smoke, fire, air, stone, salt, rain, meat, wine.
Even before the Chef’s Table debut on Netflix, Mallmann’s influence had been growing almost in direct proportion to his desire to distance himself from the culinary upper crust and do his own thing. Now Francis spends most of his time in Patagonia, while running his 10 restaurants around the world in South America and also in the USA and France.
