Kyle Hepp

January 19, 2011

In case you want to read more about this lovely new blogging tradition of Date Night, check out the first post here.

Seba and I decided that for our second week of Date Night we’d go do something we’ve been meaning to do forever — eat lunch at the Peluqueria Francesa and then follow the map in the menu. When you eat there, you’ll see that every menu has a guide to the Historic Route through Barrio Yungay.

I’ve been to the Peluqueria Francesa a million times. I love them because they have a delicious drink called a Chocolate Sour, and the best ambiance in all of Santiago. Plus, their Happy Hour Sour is great — 1,400 pesos for said Chocolate Sour = I’ll have two more please!

Plus, they have always been wonderful about letting me photograph there if I want to pop in with a couple. That is rare in Santiago. RARE, I’m telling you. If you’ve ever been in a photo session with us, odds are you’ve been kicked out of somewhere with us (if we don’t ask permission) or denied (if we do ask permission). But the people at Peluqueria Francesa are great. They say yes, they are so nice they even ask if we need more lights turned on or more windows open. I’ve never been treated so good at anywhere we’ve tried to photograph and I must say that it’s totally refreshing. After the first time I asked, when I promised that if I linked to them and put pictures on my website they would get some new business, every time I’ve had the opportunity, I’ve gone back. It helps that they’re located about a five minute drive from my house. And no, they’re not paying me to say any of this. I just heart them.

On their menu, they have a map of the neighborhood they’re located in, Barrio Yungay. It’s a “Ruta Historica,” so there are tons of cultural sites that are now under protection by the government. That’s not saying much, clearly. This church still has rubble piled up from after the earthquake and appears to have had it’s outer siding stripped off it (or something). Though I’m hoping that means that it looks like this because they’re restoring it.

So first we at our delicious lunch there. In the past when I’ve eaten there, I always had a salad and/or quiche because their salads are far superior to most of what I’ve found in Chile. Fresher good romaine lettuce instead of iceberg, massive palmitos, etc.

See Seba’s face right here? This is the face of a man who wished we didn’t go on a Sunday because there were way too many kids running around. I’m not anti-kid. I am, however, anti-parents who don’t control their kids in what I would consider to be a grown up restaurant.

But this time I decided to try something else. I can’t even remember what it was called (Papillote maybe?). It was delicious philo dough wrapped around some kind of filete meat in a wine sauce. So. Damn. Good. And I also got an avocado and hearts of palm salad. Seba tried their Filete a lo Porto and he says it was also ridiculously good. I only tried the thick cut of country bacon they put on top, but that in and of itself was great.

The restaurant/bar is so cool because it really is like a museum. It’s decorated in all antiques and you can supposedly buy anything off the walls. You can see the decor better in this photo shoot we did a while back.

After lunch, we headed out to explore Barrio Yungay.

We had been to a lot of places on the map already — the museums inside and around Quinta Normal Park, for example. So we set off to find some of the other churches and historic buildings in the area. There are probably enough things on the route that you could spend a whole day searching them. However, you wouldn’t want to during the summer time. It was hot as balls.

We didn’t end up photographing the landmarks as much as we did the places we saw walking in between each one.

Loving the bunny face

Such a beautiful, colorful, shady neighborhood. I would buy a place here in a heartbeat. The only problem for us when we looked was that almost everything for sale was a house, and we would have needed far more to remodel a house instead of an apartment.

My only real issue with this neighborhood was the talk poop on the streets. I felt like I was in Valparaiso, except we didn’t see too many strays — we mostly saw pet dogs on leashes, so I’m assuming that dog owners who live in Yungay just suck.

Seba is holding the map to his face here. Oh no! Secret’s out! He said he wanted my blog readers to see his shadow and think he had a square head.

Funny story about this statue — it’s on the historical route and it’s called the Estatua del Roto Chileno. Roto in Chilean Spanish is basically like a citified version of a redneck, or somebody generally poor with no class. Another word for roto, would be flaite, though to my understanding, flaites generally have more of an intent to harm and are more dangerous. So we walked to this statue. We got there and I was really disappointed. Why? Because I thought that this was going to be a statue dedicated to the equivalent of a citified redneck Chilean.

Seba then explained to me that no, in this case, roto means a typical folkloric character in history.

Boooo. I wanted a statue dedicated to El Flaite Chileno. Only in my dreams.

There are some HUGE and gorgeous houses still left standing in Yungay. Seba and I decided that a company must live here because no modern day single family could keep up a house this big.

Our lunch at the Peluqueria Francesa and our walk through Barrio Yungay was the perfect date night! We had fun exploring an area that we’ve been in a million times, but haven’t stopped to appreciate before.

I will say though, the map in the Peluqueria Francesa leaves a little to be desired. A lot of the landmarks are not where they appear to be on the map, they’re simply…nearby.

But hey, if it were easy, it wouldn’t be Chile.