The Restaurant
Olam Restaurante opened on Carmencita in Las Condes in 2015 as chef Sergio Barroso's flagship in Santiago — the project of a Spanish-trained cook whose stages run through several Michelin-starred Iberian houses and whose previous Santiago kitchen at 040 had carried the city's most ambitious fine-dining programme for half a decade. The room — about sixty covers across a single dining hall with a working open kitchen along the back wall — was built around the working idea of haute-cuisine seafood delivered in a tapas-style sharing format, which Barroso has been refining as a working philosophy since his Madrid stages.
The menu is structured as a selected sequence of shared plates rather than the classic three-course progression. The kitchen runs about thirty rotating preparations through service: a sea-urchin tartlet with chardonnay sabayon, a daily ceviche with Chilean-Pacific catch, a king-crab cannelloni, a sous-vide-then-seared cured tuna belly, a daily langoustine preparation, a salt-baked whole flatfish for the table, and a working list of cooked-fish plates that rotate with the morning's market. Service is captain-led and paced for the menu — a typical Olam dinner runs about two-and-a-half hours and covers seven to nine plates. Recent menus have included a Patagonian toothfish course and a smoked-mussels plate that has become the kitchen's most-photographed dish.
The wine programme runs about three hundred labels with proper depth in Chilean producers — verticals in Errazuriz, Concha y Toro Don Melchor, and the Carmenère programme — and a small but careful Argentine, Spanish, and French shelf. The bar runs a selected pisco sour and a small classic-cocktail list. Service in the dining room is closer to a working Spanish-Michelin format than a Latin-American grand-hotel programme. The room has been a World's 50 Best Discovery listing since 2019 and a Latin America's 50 Best fixture, and it remains the working answer for Santiago corporate hosting that requires a seafood-led menu and a Spanish-trained kitchen.
Why This Is Santiago’s Impress Clients Pick
Olam is the Santiago client-impressing answer because every working decision in the room favors the host. The tapas-style shared format gives a guest the option of trying eight or nine plates over the course of a long lunch rather than committing to a single course, which the typical Andean business-lunch culture does not always accommodate. The Spanish-trained service programme reads as international rather than provincial — a guest from Madrid or Barcelona understands the room on entering. The wine list runs deep enough in Chilean verticals to deliver a careful Carmenère gesture and a serious Don Melchor pour. And the Las Condes location, in the working business district, keeps the lunch within a fifteen-minute drive of Apoquindo and El Golf.
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