MEET YOUR HOST

Francis Mallmann

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. Francis enjoys spending his time at la soplada in Patagonia, while also running his 10 restaurants around the world in South America and in the USA and France.