This is the world's ultimate barbecue cookery school

On a secret island in Patagonia you'll find the world's farthest-flung cookery school - the romantic escape of South America's beloved chef Francis Mallmann, a meat-smoking nomad who quotes poetry and has barbecued for David Beckham and the King of Spain. We cast away with him to drink, fish, and cook with fire

I get a text as I board the plane to Buenos Aires. I'm on my way to Patagonia to meet the Argentine chef Francis Mallmann on his private island. The message is from Jacqui Ritchie, wife of film director Guy Ritchie. 'Mallmann is a genius, more of an aesthete than a chef. I'd love to use an emoji but nothing is exciting enough.'

She has the inside track; he cooked at an autumn party for the Ritchies at their home in Wiltshire. There were tables covered in grass turf and an orgy of fat chickens, dripping ribs of beef and whole pineapples and cabbages hung from an incredible igloo structure fashioned from metal frames set above a circle of flames. David Beckham posted a video of himself on Instagram standing right in the middle of this ultimate BBQ, and would later name the book Mallmann on Fire as one of his luxuries on the 75th-anniversary edition of Desert Island Discs.

Mallmann is South America's most beloved chef, with seven restaurants across the continent, including his now-famous rural sanctuary in Garzón in Uruguay. He moved to the dozy, dusty hamlet from José Ignacio, the former fishing village where he had opened Los Negros, a tiny restaurant that ended up attracting a fiercely loyal crowd of Hollywood actors, models and moguls. More recently, he has opened a restaurant at the high-octane La Faena hotel in Miami, and this summer at Paddy McKillen's remarkable Villa La Coste in the South of France. After two decades of trying to set up shop in London, the rumour is he will open a restaurant in Mayfair this autumn.

La Isla is probably the most remote place I've ever been and my journey to Lago La Plata is long and bumpy, with a flight from Buenos Aires to the rather gloomy Comodoro Rivadavia - a port town on the San Jorge Gulf - followed by a five-hour, dirt-road drive past endless ranches of lazy, grazing cattle and beady-eyed eagles balanced on bullet-holed road signs (used as passing target practice, apparently). Then it's on with the waterproofs for an hour's skud across the icy-cold lake to Mallmann's private retreat. I feel like I am on a pilgrimage to a foodie mecca to meet some kind of god, and pray that reality doesn't disappoint.

It does not. A camo-grey boat whizzes to meet us in the middle of the lake, with Mallmann at the helm, blue-eyes twinkling, brandishing three freshly caught trout. Poseidon in a poncho. We tail him back to La Isla where a jet-black house with bright white curtains stands out against the dark lengas trees.

'I first came to Lago La Plata 30 years ago,' the chef tells me a little later. 'We camped in tents on the edge of the lake on a beach. I had the most beautiful girlfriend then, and each night she would wash her hair in a stream. My children Alexia and Francisco were probably three and five, and we had two weeks of sun and fishing and eating and drinking and joy.'

'But the following year it rained for two weeks so I started to think about building a cabin. It's such a wonderfully isolated place, I wanted to come more often, and not just in fine weather. Although not with all the mothers at once,' he chuckles. Mallmann has six children by four wives, and is currently in an open marriage with Vanina, with whom he has a four-year-old daughter, Heloísa.

Today, there is no rain, but here in the southern hemisphere, winter is coming. Fortunately it's snuggly in the chef's new house, La Soplada (which worryingly translates as 'blown away'). It was constructed as a set for his Argentine TV series on cooking in the outdoors, moving between different locations in Patagonia, where it did blow away, twice, before landing as a permanent fixture on the island. The original cabin, slowly built over 30 years, is now used by staff. But both easily fit this description from Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia: 'I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.'

Yet, for a cabin, La Soplada is unexpectedly comfortable and devilishly detailed. 'What I wanted to achieve here is the simplicity of elegance,' says Mallmann. 'Do you know that incredible poem, "In a Station of the Metro", by Ezra Pound? It was a very long poem and he worked for many years to make it shorter and shorter and finally it became just two sentences… that's elegance.'

The three bright bedrooms in La Soplada are piled high with thick duvets, and there are roll-top tubs and bath sheets fit for a giant. The entrance hall houses a riot of hats, axes and fishing rods and there's an impressive collection of hand-made Astier de Villatte china in the kitchen, alongside a simple bowl of lemons. ('I have lemons in all my restaurants, it's a symbol of joy for me,' says Mallmann.)

In the sitting room, shelves curtsy under the weight of DVDs and books (from Russian poetry to the last-ever print run of the Encyclopaedia Britannica), while on the linen-covered coffee table a Hermès backgammon board sits waiting, evidence that La Isla is a Wi-Fi and phone-free zone. Throughout the house, windows stand like translucent sentinels with views of Patagonia, the beautiful narcissist who has turned the lake into a mirror to admire her own reflection: high peaks cupped by clouds and skirted with dark, impenetrable forests.

The next day I wake at first light as the sun begins to warm the highest snowcapped peak of the Cerro El Gorro mountains, which mark the border with Chile. From a side window I catch a glimpse of the chef: morning glorious in a blue-linen nightshirt, denim beret and slippers, arms piled with wood to light his first fire of the day, the kitchen stove.

'I'm so happy at this time. Another day to love, to dream,' he says over a breakfast of homemade croissants, jam made by his brother Carlos and butter churned by a Welshman from Gaiman, a descendant of one of Patagonia's 1865 settlers.

'Patagonia is home,' says Mallmann. This is despite having houses wherever he has a restaurant: in Buenos Aires and Mendoza, Uruguay, Chile, the South of France and Miami. Born in Buenos Aires, he grew up in Bariloche where his physicist father was head of the atomic research centre, the Balseiro Institute. 'What I learnt as a child was the language of this geography, this climate,' he says, gesticulating at the clouds high above the mountains, 'It's one of the most important things I have in my life, like a seed my parents put in my pocket; this incredible gift of understanding, and the knowledge of this… of Patagonia.'

Mallmann left both school and home at the age of 13. 'I had a difficult relationship with my parents,' he says. 'It was the hippie movement, a renaissance moment for all the youngsters of the world and it was very strong in me. My father would look at me in my pink pants, Liberty flowered shirts, high-heeled boots, hair to here,' Mallmann chops a hand at his waist. 'He didn't understand. And at 13 it was impossible for me to explain.'

The teenage Mallmann worked as a DJ in a Patagonia nightclub, sleeping in a little room above it. At 16 he moved to California for the music scene, doing odd jobs as a carpenter, pest-control man and gardener before returning, aged 18, to open his first restaurant. He later moved to Paris and earnt his chops working in three-Michelin-star kitchens before coming home to Argentina, where he became known for his classic French dishes.

'Then suddenly, when I was 40, I realised it was time for a change,' he says. 'I started remembering the fires of my childhood. They were so… BIG inside of me. And that's when I started finding my own voice, a sort of stream-of-consciousness with fire.'

Now, just a few times a year, Mallmann accepts paying guests who want to learn about the hot stuff. Most recently the model and artist Cuba Tornado Scott (director Ridley Scott's granddaughter) and her mother Rhea came to the island. 'I try to teach them not only cooking, but the spirit of fire,' he says. 'On the first day, I sit them on a log, build a big, big fire for them and say, "OK you're going to sit there for three hours; you're going to watch this burn down from big flames to coal to ashes and then you will write an essay about it and tell me what you saw.'' You have to understand what happens with fire; all those different temperatures are the beauty of cooking with it.'

It's time for my lesson, so we zip across the water to a nearby beach to prepare dinner. Although Mallmann is 61 years old, he hops out of the boat like a boy, striding the water's edge 10 paces ahead of his team.

'I have cooked for the King of Spain,' he says. 'And the Dutch royal family and some presidents we'd better not mention. And the fun thing is always the protocol. I cooked for the Prime Minister of China and I was told not to look him in the eye when I talked to him. But I said "Fuck off! How can I not look at him during lunch?" Then the Prime Minister said, "I want to try the cow." So I grabbed my big knife and walked with him to the fire. Later the ambassador told me there were 20 security staff, hiding, with their guns pointed at me! I could have been killed!'

Today, Mallmann works with a seven-handed team including three 'gypsy chefs', as he calls them, plus a butler, a woodsman and an engineer. They follow their leader like myrmidons. But the respect goes both ways; it's owed and earnt. 'I think cooking is a craft. But I think service and setting the scene are among the most beautiful arts that exist,' he says, glancing along the beach as his men saw and whittle the wood, tend and tame the fire. It is precisely this combination of delicious food and mise-en-scène that has elevated him from chef to culinary rock star; tapping into a hunger for experience by delivering the drama that adds frisson to his flavours.

Before long an extraordinary, green-wood contraption is mounted over the flames that gently lick a Catherine wheel of chorizo, an octave of skewered beef ribs and a whole skinned pineapple. The chef has smeared a brook trout - his catch of the day - in clay scooped from beside the lake, ready to bake in the hot coals alongside some bread and a gently caramelising pumpkin. This spectacle, right here, this is Mallmann's jam.

The mood is puckish as we eat by candlelight, tiny fragments of ash fluttering around like silver snow. Each mouthful is more delicious than the next, washed down with magnums of rosé Champagne. 'It's feminine but brutal,' he says of the wine. 'I like opposites and contradictions. I want the food and wine to fight in my mouth, to see which is better.'

Indeed, with the sand beneath our boots, eating tender meat served on wooden boards while sipping Krug from fine Riedel glasses, the gustatory extremes couldn't be clearer. Cigars are passed round, 'They were brought here 20 years ago by an Englishman called Billy Guinness,' says Mallmann, before picking up his guitar to sing a Spanish love song called 'La Paloma'.

The return ride to La Isla is lit only by the pierced-blanket of stars above. I realise I came here expecting to find a god, but instead I found an extraordinary human. A man full of creativity, generosity, confidence and fallibility, all worn with the lightness of one of his linen nightshirts. And, yes, there isn't an emoji nearly exciting enough to describe the experience of meeting him.

Private cooking lessons with Mallmann at La Isla, Patagonia, cost about £34,000 (four people for five nights). Email [email protected]

This feature was originally published in Condé Nast Traveller July/ August 2017

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