Fire-starting super chef Francis Mallmann is raising his game again, offering a new raft of hyper-local pursuits on his private island in Argentinean Patagonia. Dropped in the middle of Lago La Plata, isolated La Isla has been the personal refuge of the native-born chef since 1985. Despite owning 10 restaurants, having written two best-selling books, and finding even greater fame on Chef's Table, Mallmann is still questing for fresh ideas. Two years ago, the open-fire-cooking pioneer—who has whipped up plates for the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow, Francis Ford Coppola, and adonna—decided to introduce places for guests to bed down, starting with La Soplada, a three-bedroom cabin he had relocated to the island after it was used as the set for one of his TV shows. Two new lodgings were completed last year, one of them a house on the pier.
Once everyone's here, we are only too happy to trade thumbprint-smudged devices for simpler pleasures, like outdoor cooking lessons in the shadow of the Andes. In the past few months, Mallmann has been embellishing La Isla's on-site experience with lectures and guided excursions led by a cast of experts, including geologists and anthropologists, tango teachers and ski instructors—even a documentary-producing third-generation birdwatcher, all the better for spotting the 10-foot wingspans of the region's mighty condor. “I think this is a beautiful thing to do, because there's so much to learn,” says Mallmann. “Everybody changes their state of mind, without internet, without telephones. It's a different world.” Getting to La Isla requires a degree of effort: two flights (to Buenos Aires, then the port town of Comodoro Rivadavia), followed by a six-hour van ride and a bone-rattling boat trip across the lake's icy waters. But it's the romance of this genuinely far-flung wilderness that prompts new-nomad heat-seekers to zero in—and relish it all.