Look out the windows of Gustu, the most ambitious restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia, and you’ll see the city climbing up toward the looming peaks of the Andes in a lumpy, shimmering mosaic. You might experience a momentary dread, like the one that hits before a steep hike: you’re at the bottom of the bowl. But in La Paz the lower the elevation the better you feel. The city’s average altitude is twelve thousand feet above sea level, which means about a third less oxygen per breath. The lowest-altitude neighborhoods are the most desirable. In the one called Calacoto—where Gustu is situated, at 10,993 feet—quiet cobblestone streets are lined with embassies and the offices of N.G.O.s. Local kids pronounce rico, meaning rich or delicious, as an American would, without rolling the “r”—a Bolivian version of a Brahmin lockjaw. “In the U.S. you pay for the view,” a resident told me. “Here you pay for the oxygen.”

Gustu, housed in an imposing gray concrete cube with a bank of protruding windows, is both a restaurant and an experiment in social uplift. It was opened in 2013 by the Danish food entrepreneur Claus Meyer. At the time, his most widely known venture, Noma, in Copenhagen, had been named the world’s best restaurant for the third year in a row by a jury of international chefs, critics, and restaurateurs. Meyer’s sprawling food company had come to include an apple orchard, a vinegar factory, a coffee roaster, and a salmon smokehouse. “The total group suddenly went from earning a hundred thousand dollars a year to four million a year,” he told me recently. He was surprised, and a little uncomfortable. He had always been more concerned with things like finding “an unseen vinegar-flavor balance” or harvesting the uniquely succulent turnips of the Faeroe Islands.

In recent years, Meyer and René Redzepi, Noma’s head chef, have promoted an influential declaration of gastronomic principles: the “New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto.” The document has ten points, including pleas for using local ingredients (often highly obscure ones) and a call for “purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics.” Making millions of dollars is not one of the points. “I got to thinking I could give a little bit away, in a nice way, without feeling poor afterwards,” Meyer said. He started a foundation called Melting Pot, which taught prisoners in Denmark how to cook, but that came to seem insufficiently ambitious. He wanted to fight against “McDonaldization,” and see if his philosophy of food could help lift people out of poverty. Maybe, he thought, eating sea buckthorn and gooseberries had “something in it for mankind.”

His first idea was to open an outpost in one of the troubled countries of southeastern Europe—Bulgaria, Greece, Romania—or possibly in Kazakhstan. He wrote to the European commissioner of agriculture to ask “if she thought there would be a poor country in Europe that would maybe benefit.” When she didn’t answer, he started researching other possibilities, looking for a poor (but not too poor) place with exceptional biodiversity and relatively little crime. He developed a ranked list and considered Ghana, Vietnam, and Nepal. Vietnamese cuisine was already too good, Meyer decided; all the great combinations of ingredients had been discovered. Then he hit on Bolivia. Though it is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, it has, Meyer said, “a great undiscovered larder of fantastic products that people could be seduced by.”

Yet when Meyer visited La Paz, he recalled, he was “frustrated and depressed.” The altitude made him so sick that he brought an oxygen tank to meetings. “I would never take my family to live there,” he concluded. “You can’t even drink the water.” The average monthly wage was less than two hundred dollars, and most locals preferred to eat traditional Bolivian dishes sold at sidewalk stalls and markets; soups made with dehydrated potatoes or beef kidneys were popular. The tourist trade catered largely to backpackers looking for cheap hostels and coca tea. Meyer remembered thinking, “This can never happen. There is no market for this. We will have forty employees but no clients.” Then he descended to Calacoto and began to feel better. “We found a place in La Paz that looked as if it had some well-dressed people.”

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He began planning a Bolivian equivalent of Noma: a “fine-dining temple” with an avant-garde tasting menu, composed entirely from indigenous ingredients. To advance his goal of “fighting poverty through deliciousness,” he would create a culinary school for disadvantaged youths. Meyer wanted to train a generation of cooks who would educate their communities and redefine the way Bolivians perceive traditional ingredients. “When you see kids in the slums growing up on white rice, potatoes, and white flour, all imported from another country, then getting diabetes before they turn twenty, something is wrong,” Meyer said. He formed a partnership with a Danish N.G.O. called IBIS, which had been working in Bolivia for decades, and started a Bolivian offshoot of Melting Pot. Each organization agreed to an initial investment of five hundred thousand dollars. To his critics, especially in Bolivia, the idea smelled like a Viking in need of a shower. Meyer shrugged them off.

The cooks for his restaurant could come from the culinary school, he decided. But he needed a chef to lead the kitchen. He approached Kamilla Seidler, a thirty-two-year-old Dane who had worked in some of Europe’s top restaurants, including Mugaritz, a two-Michelin-star establishment in northern Spain that is known for such whimsical experiments as edible cutlery. To interview for the job, Seidler went to Meyer’s house and cooked for his family: four courses, she recalls, with a dessert built around passion fruit (“giving it the Latin touch”) and sorrel (“for some acidity”). She got the job, and in the next three years she was joined by staff members from Bolivia and half a dozen other countries. Her friend Michelangelo Cestari, an Italian-Venezuelan chef, was hired as Gustu’s C.E.O. “I’m extremely impressed with what they are doing down there,” Meyer told me. “And the fact that they have found—what do you call it?—peace. I think it changed their lives in a good way and not a strange way.”

Seidler might disagree about the strange part. To bring prosperity to the restaurant, she participated in a sacrifice of a llama fetus. She helped craft a recipe for quinoa Communion wafers and had them delivered to Pope Francis when he passed through La Paz. She hosted a lunch for families of Amazonian reptile hunters. Although she went to Bolivia planning to stay for a year, she recently bought a house next to a tourist attraction called the Valley of the Moon—an expanse of sandstone and clay that resembles a colossal sea sponge. “I feel like I’m in a Tarantino movie every time I drive home,” she said.

Seidler grew up in Copenhagen, cooking with her grandmothers, and got her first food job, in a bakery, at fifteen. From the start, she was implacable in the kitchen. When burglars broke into the bakery one day, she chased them off with a bread knife. At Gustu, she has the attentive look of a goalkeeper surveying the field; the anxieties of the job show only in her hands, which fidget constantly. She spends most of her time at work, but during off hours she reads about the local cuisine or flips through Danish thrillers or goes to the movies, occasionally by herself. One evening in La Paz, when a ticket-seller asked if she was alone, she retorted, “Would you like to accompany me?”