This Remote Uruguay Ghost Town Is Now a Culinary Destination

Uruguay’s Ruta Nacional 10 begins in the capital city of Montevideo, then ambles through suburbs and hills before making its way to the coast, where it connects Punta del Estate with a dozen or so little beach towns along its way. It begins as a four-lane divided highway in the west, and once you head north and east enough almost to the country’s border with Brazil, “el diez” becomes just a single lane in each direction, little more than a dirt road in some sections. The further you drive away from the city, the less traffic you encounter, and the more wild the landscape becomes.

This part of Uruguay, about two hours east of Montevideo, is still very much the South America of days past — the days when gauchos roamed horseback, long before the sprawl of tourism began to inch its way up from the city. It was here that Francis Mallmann (a celebrity chef in South America, known for catering Sofia Sanchez and Alex de Betak’s wedding in Patagonia last year as well as starring in an episode of the hit Netflix docu-series Chef’s Table) opened a restaurant in 1977. “When I started my restaurant in José Ignacio, it was like a fisherman’s town,” he says. “It had almost no roads, no water, no electricity. We opened a high-end restaurant with silverware and beautiful china, so it was a huge contrast.” Over time, however, as Uruguay’s leisure class began to grow, affluent weekenders from Montevideo began to come more and more to José Ignacio, and today, the town is a glitzy destination. It began to resemble the Hamptons in terms of crowdedness and social goings-on.

Raised in Patagonia, Mallmann is known to favor remote, unexpected locations for his restaurants. So once José Ignacio become too developed for his liking, he began to look elsewhere. “The town was getting too crowded, too glamorous. It was filling up with houses, like mushrooms coming up, in every style possible. Not very nice,” he said. It was in 2003 that he decided to look not further up Ruta 10, but, rather, go inland. Just a 20 kilometers inland from José Ignacio sat a windswept ghost town: Garzón.

The village of Garzòn was a thriving railroad stop around the turn of the 20th century, until the government decided to move the highway closer to the ocean and eventually decommissioned the rail stop there. So whereas the population in the early 1900’s was a few prosperous thousand, Garzón from mid-century onwards had only about two hundred residents. The town languished — its abandoned pueblo buildings gathered dust and tumbleweeds, and stray dogs roamed its streets. In other words, it was ripe for a Francis Mallmann restaurant.