>> What sort of staple vegetables and meat would be available in a normal supermarket or
>> wherever you shop in Chile?
The fruit and veg markets are an absolute joy. Great produce, massive variety, and all fresh. Of course there are things you can't get either because of the weather or local taste; garden peas, brussells, quality celery, and that sort of thing. but the stuff you can get is great.
In particular salads are always excellent here, albeit served at room temperature. As an aside if you served a Chilean salad with chilled ingredients he would assume that it was not fresh.
And of course I have half a dozen orange trees, half a dozen lemon trees in the garden which makes for great G&Ts or Vodka and Orange!
Meat is a different matter. Chileans are not picky about the quality of their meat. And mostly it's pretty rubbish. Not actually bad of course, but these are people who are happy to eat, say, cow without any sense of selection about which bit.
Allied to that the cuts of meat are quite different.
As a general rule the girls avoid meat they haven't either cooked themselves or in a few restaurants where we know the chefs/owners and they know how we like stuff.
Seafood is purportedly excellent. Sadly I don't like most seafood. Cod & chips and a prawn cocktail are about my limits.
I don't eat poultry anywhere. That s*** can kill you. And in any case their quality approach to chicken is much like their quality approach to beef.
Restaurants here are quite surprising when compared to the rest of South America - typically a place of great restaurants. Mostly the food is bland, over-cooked, and ridiculously over salted. In fact pretty much the only spice they use is salt.
It is usually served warm rather than hot. In fact most food is served warm here, whether it was intended to be hot or indeed cold it is served warm.
Restaurant service is truly b***** awful. Compared to Brazil for example, Sao Paulo probably has the best restaurants on the Planet Earth and Rio isn't far behind. Any restaurant with bad service in Brazil will literally go out of business in a week, whatever level of the posh scale it's on.
On the other hand we were down at friends recently, actually farmers who look after some land for us, having a pleasant afternoon. When the farmer decided we should have a barbecue, walked out into the field and killed a sheep, built a b***** great fire in the middle of the yard and cooked it. Now *that* was a good barbecue.
tl:dr = great produce, crap meat, crap restaurants, different tastes, unless you know people
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