An awesome foodie experience beckoned as we set off on a whirlwind tour of Chile. ProChile, Chile’s Foreign Office department, had wanted top chefs to visit its country to show them the food and drink it is so proud of, and flew us in from all parts of the globe for a trip of a lifetime that covered the whole of Chile in an amazing 12 days. Talk about air miles!

My fellow travellers were: Rafael Bautista from Les Moustaches Restaurant in Mexico; Daniel Schick from Le Meridien in Toronto, Canada; Rodrigo Oliveira from Mocotto in Brazil; Nick Flynn from InterContinental in Seoul, North Korea; and Mary Sue Miliken from Los Angeles, USA.

We also had ProChile delegates accompanying us as well as a film crew that filmed us daily for a TV programme plus a documentary on Chile TV.

The tour began in Santiago, the nation’s capital and nerve centre of the country, where we stayed downtown at the five star Plaza San Francisco Hotel. Santiago is also the place to meet some of Chile’s most renowned chefs.

Its fish terminal and La Vega farmers’ market offer some of the most amazing produce. The terminal is the largest fish and shellfish distribution centre in the city, handling one million kilos a month – 75% of Chilean production, all arriving daily from the Pacific. It is the single largest source of fresh fish and shellfish products to hotels, restaurants, farmers’ markets and food stores in the capital.

The La Vega central farmers’ market is one of the most traditional and oldest urban markets in the region, and we saw some of the best fresh produce we’d ever seen. For more than 100 years, it has been supplying restaurants and local residents with fresh vegetables, fruit, meat and dry goods, sourced mainly from the rich farmlands of central Chile.

With the Andes mountain range on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, the soil conditions are rich and fertile so the growing conditions are perfect. With this kind of backdrop, there is virtually no need to import much at all. Stacks of asparagus, avocados and artichokes stood 14ft to 16ft high, 20ft wide, and the quality was amazing in size, texture and colour.

One of the more unusual specimens was a purple and yellow speckled potato that looked as if someone had painted it. We took some back to the hotel and sweet-talked the chef into cooking them. The inside flesh was a rich yellow colour, and when cooked had a real creamy taste just like a normal spud. The colour faded but it was still appealing.

Our first taste of local fish was when we dined at Ostras Azócar, a colourful fish restaurant housed in a 119 year old building. It featured the outstanding flavours and aromas of parmigiana pink clams, lobster, shrimp, mussels, pink cusk eel, swordfish, squid and more, all brought straight from the sea to your table. We were served 120 oysters and around 75 clams au gratin, and this was before we ordered our main course, as the restaurant was so happy to host us.

I had pink cusk eel as a main course. It was similar to a conga eel but deep pink and red in colour. Fascinating raw but again, when cooked, the colour vanished.

It was interesting that being honoured guests we munched our way through four course lunches and five course dinners, yet the Chileans quite happily would have had a snack lunch and then a huge meal late evening.

The next day our group visited Monteolivo, an olive oil company set in 40 hectares on the sun drenched slopes of Curacaví Valley, to see its vast estates.

In 2003 it added the 800 hectare San Mariano estate in the Maipo Valley to its estate, where it now has 230 hectares under production, and then it acquired Las Damas, a 455 hectare property in the Colchagua Valley, near the coast.

By late 2009 more than 600 hectares of olive trees will be planted at both estates.

Afterwards we were treated to a dinner hosted by chef Guillermo Rodríguez at his Espacio Gastronómico restaurant where food, as he puts it, is “the beginning, middle and end of a full experience”. His restaurant has only one table and we sat around this with local VIPs and chefs. We gathered that to eat there, you had to be in the know, as it seemed to cater purely for private parties.

But we got a chance to appreciate Rodríguez’s vision of food, which he defines as a shared social event and a challenge he meets by creating dishes whose flavours, colours and textures truly reflect the regions, people and cultures that make up Chile.

With his fascination for colour, taste and texture, we weren’t surprised that he had a workshop above his restaurant where he experiments with food – it was reminiscent of El Bulli’s Ferran Adría’s labs.

Rodríguez, who was trained at the prestigious École de L’Hôtellerie de Paris, is renowned for bringing back long forgotten products and dishes such as quínoa, merkén, salmon, avocado, Chilean carica, barley, lamb, krill, always in close association with wine.

He also took part in the launch of restaurants that would later become a legend among local gourmands, including L’Étoile at the San Cristóbal Sheraton Hotel and the Bristol at the Plaza San Francisco Hotel. These have turned him into the protagonist of some of the most important food events in recent history and one of the best culinary ambassadors of Chile, cooking for major world leaders as the President’s chef.

Part of the group’s introductions included my talk about the Craft Guild. It took twice as long as everything had to be translated into Spanish, but at the end I remembered to present everyone with a Craft Guild of Chefs pin badge, so we can safely say we have a global brand.

The first stage of the trip was amazing and the second stage even more so with much learnt along the way. Watch this space ....