Pavilion at Viña VIK is Chile's lone pick on a hotel list

Pavilion Viña VIK Chile is the sole Chilean name on Travel + Leisure's new ranking of the world's best hotel restaurants and bars, chosen from 120 candidates across 17 countries.

The magazine's editors reviewed hotel dining rooms, bars and even moving venues, including a train and a cruise ship, before settling on 25 for the final list. Pavilion, the restaurant inside the VIK estate in Millahue, in the Cachapoal Valley of Chile's O'Higgins Region, made the cut as the only representative of South American wine country.

Chef Pablo Cáceres runs a five-to-eight-course seasonal menu built around an organic garden on the estate that grows more than 250 varieties of vegetables, herbs and edible flowers. Dishes singled out in the coverage include crab with pomegranate sorbet and a mushroom ice cream served over puffed quinoa, both built to sit alongside VIK's own wines rather than the other way around.

In all other places I worked, I created a dish and the sommelier chose the wine. Here it's reversed.

"In all other places I worked, I created a dish and the sommelier chose a wine to go with it; here it's reversed," Cáceres has said of the kitchen's approach. "Food design must be created for our wines."

A dining room built around the cellar

That inversion matters here more than most places, since Viña VIK was ranked number one in the World's 50 Best Vineyards list in 2025, giving the estate two overlapping reputations to defend in the same year: one for what grows in the glass, one for what lands on the plate.

The building itself is part of the draw. Pavilion was designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic, who won the 2026 Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, making this one of the few restaurants anywhere currently operating inside a Pritzker laureate's own work.

Chile's wine regions keep drawing attention

The recognition lands as Chile's producers push into new categories too, including a newly created legal category for low-alcohol wine, part of a broader effort to widen what the country's vineyards are known for beyond its traditional reds.

For Pavilion, the next test is simpler: keep a menu built for a cellar interesting enough to hold its place next to a floating restaurant on a cruise ship and a dining car on a moving train.