Peru is fast developing a reputation as the culinary capital of South America; its own capital, Lima, is home to some of the most exciting restaurants on the continent, dishing up traditional specialties with a sophisticated twist.

It’s September, during Mistura, Lima’s annual culinary festival. In a conference room, Sonia Bahamonde – the brains behind cult cevicheria Restaurant Sonia in Chorrillos – speaks to a closed room of reporters, along with her husband Fredy and daughter, also named Sonia. There are screams outside. It sounds like Justin Bieber is walking by. The screams come closer. As the door opens, shouts of “Gastón, Gastón!” ring through the hall.

Right on cue, Gastón Acurio – Peru’s most applauded chef, with dozens of restaurants to his name in cities from New York to Madrid – walks through the door. He stands to one side of the room, respectfully trying not to interrupt one of his culinary idols. He is just catching his breath, it seems. Sonia gives him a big smile but goes right on answering questions as if his presence doesn’t faze her. Acurio soon walks out and a cloud of paparazzi and screams chase him away.

Around 400,000 people visited the food fair during its nine-day run in 2011. Set in the Parque De La Exposición in Lima’s city centre, it has become a sort of Disneyland version of Peruvian gastronomy. There are hundreds of stalls set up representing restaurants from across the country; chefs give cooking demonstrations and lectures to standing-room-only audiences; awards are given for the best ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime juice) and causa (a potato-ají amarillo mash with tuna and avocado); there are parades and concerts. This is a culture obsessed with food. 

Apart from the surfer Sofía Mulánovich, Peru has few star athletes and even fewer internationally famous singers or actors. In Peru, chefs are the rockstars and appear on billboards advertising everything from banks to beer.

The best restaurants congregate in the upscale Lima districts of Miraflores, San Isidro, and Barranco. Gastón Acurio has a cevicheria (La Mar), a steakhouse (Panchita), a bistro (T’anta), and a Chinese-Peruvian restaurant (Madam Tusan) in town. His groundbreaking Astrid y Gastón, named one of San Pellegrino’s Top 50 Restaurants in the world, is being moved to a San Isidro mansion, beside a boutique hotel, to become a Peruvian culinary centre.

While Acurio has been at the forefront of Peru’s gastronomic boom for more than a decade, many of the country’s most promising chefs are ones he has inspired or who have worked in parts of his empire. Virgilio Martinez, 34, is a prime example. He spent a decade in kitchens such as Lutece in New York, Santceloni in Spain, and a couple of places in Hong Kong and Singapore, before landing the head chef position at Astrid y Gastón in Madrid. He opened Restaurante Central – a sleek eatery with a rooftop garden, a water purification system and a chocolate cellar – in Miraflores three years ago. Here, the skinny-jeans-wearing Martinez pairs duck with wormwood bitters, suckling pig with cacao, and scents octopus with charred purple corn.

Even more groundbreaking is the work of thirtysomething Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, whose restaurant Malabar cracked San Pellegrino’s Top 100 in 2011. After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in New York and working in several top Italian kitchens, the chef spent a year in the Amazon studying fish, fruits and other plants. He’s now a world authority on rare South American ingredients, introducing Peru to kushuro, an endangered Andean algae, and carachama, an armoured Amazonian catfish that eats fallen fruit, that he incorporates into elegant tasting menus in his restaurant as well as on the MV Aqua and MV Aria – luxury Amazonian cruise ships for which he designed the menus and on which he regularly helms the stoves. 



In every direction, a new culinary boundary is being pushed. At Manifiesto in Miraflores, Giacomo Bocchio, who worked in the kitchens of Brazil’s D.O.M. and Spain’s El Celler de Can Roca, is creating avant-garde dishes that are based on recipes from the southern Peruvian city of Tacna.
In the flashy new Westin hotel, the tallest building in Peru and the brand’s first foray into South America, chef Rafael Piqueras is experimenting with molecular gastronomy using ingredients from across the country, such as the pink salt from the Cuzco area after which the restaurant is named.

At La Pescaderia, a concept fish market and cevicheria in a beautiful old Barranco mansion, there is an emphasis on supporting sustainable fish and shellfish producers.

El Mercado – from Rafael Osterling, who’s expanding his establishments around Latin America – is a cool, casual cevicheria with lots of sushi on the menu.

Then there’s Jason Nanka, an ecologically-minded young Australian chef who recently opened a restaurant in the suburb of La Molina with his Peruvian wife. “There are many good reasons to open a restaurant in Lima at the moment,” says Nanka. “The economy is growing fast and so, too, is the gastronomic scene.”

Nanka is amazed at the sheer number of traditional Peruvian recipes he’s discovered since moving here. “If you ask me to name traditional plates of food from Australia, I could probably name five off the top of my head,” he said. “In Peru, there are hundreds.”

He is particularly fond of ají amarillo, the Peruvian yellow chilli. “It has a unique flavour that is not present in any of the mainstream chillies we use in Australia. In the restaurant, we probably use 30 kilograms of it a week – and that is very little compared to the traditional Peruvian restaurants.”

Part of the attraction of Lima, even with Peru’s booming economy and rapidly expanding middle class, is that restaurant prices are so low. The cost of an eight-course tasting menu from a top restaurant might be one-third the price of one in New York or Sydney. Yet even at street level, where a meal costs next to nothing, the quality is superb.

At its best, Peruvian food is like Italian food – it’s simple, fresh, and uses very particular ingredients. Case in point are anticuchos, specifically those from Anticuchos Tía Grima. The restaurant’s 70-year-old owner, Tía Grimanesa, spent 38 years cooking anticuchos de corazon, or charcoal-grilled beef hearts, from a sidewalk grill. Her seasoning and execution on the coals turns this typically discarded meat into what tastes like filet mignon.

Recently, Grimanesa has developed such a following that she’s been featured on TV and sees huge nightly queues at her restaurant – the crowds around her small grill became so large that she was forced to move into her own brick-and-mortar storefront at the end of 2011. She’s even developed her own flavour of Lay’s brand potato chips.



Around Peru’s capital, several simple restaurants and chefs have been turned into celebrities, partly with the help of Acurio’s TV series, Aventura Culinaria.

Restaurant Sonia – a cevicheria in the seaside Chorrillos district, where mother and daughter cook while the father fishes – has become legendary, and is full every day of the week. And in La Victoria, a decrepit neighbourhood full of auto shops, there’s Chez Wong, one of the city’s more eccentric culinary personalities.

Wong’s restaurant, set in his home, doesn’t have a menu. He says it would be akin to using a condom: it would limit his abilities. You enter the house – if you don’t have a reservation, you’re refused – and Wong asks if you’d like ceviche: flounder is his fish of choice. You can see him slicing the seafood with an expensive Victorinox knife at the back end of the “restaurant.” He’ll ask if you would like a second dish – if you would, you can choose something sweet or salty. If you order the latter, you’ll see Wong with a flaming wok; a saltado, or stir-fry, will soon be sent out.

The rise of pisco, Peru’s national spirit, has paralleled the country’s culinary evolution. Strict appellation of origin regulations has ensured that even mom-and-pop distillers produce top-quality piscos, and this has had a profound effect on a local cocktail culture that was already above-average.

At night, the options are many: for the best pisco sours, head to Huaringas Bar, where they’re concocted in flavours that range from passionfruit to coca leaf. Hipsters head to Ayahuasca or Picas, two stylish locales in the bohemian quarter of Barranco.
Wherever you go, you’ll be raising your glass to Lima. •

Photography by Nicholas Gill.

LAN Airlines flies to Lima from Sydney, via Auckland and Santiago, on a daily basis. 1800-558-129; lan.com

when to go
Lima has a mild climate year-round, though there are more blue skies and sunshine from December to March.

where to stay
The Westin Lima is Peru’s most modern hotel, housing one of the city’s top restaurants and the largest spa in the country. 511/201-5000; westinlima.com.pe

where to eat & drink
Anticuchos Tia Grima. Avenida Ignacio Merino 466, Miraflores.
Ayahuasca Bar. Av. San Martin 130, Barranco; 
ayahuascabar.com
Central Restaurante (Central). Calle Santa Isabel 376, Miraflores; 511/242-8515; centralrestaurante.com.pe
Chez Wong. Calle Enrique León García 114, Santa Catalina; 511/470-6217.
El Mercado. Calle Hipólito Unanue 203, Miraflores; 511/221-1322; rafaelosterling.com
Huaringas Bar. Calle Bolognesi 472, Miraflores; 511/447-1133.
La Lucha Sangucheria. Av. Benavides 308, Miraflores; 
511/241-5953.
La Mar. Av. La Mar 770, Miraflores; 511/421-3365; lamarcebicheria.com
La Pescadería. Av. Grau 689, Barranco; 511/586-8423.
Madam Tusan. Santa Cruz 858, Miraflores; 511/505-5090.
Malabar. Calle Camino Real 101, San Isidro; 511/440-5200; malabar.com.pe
Manifiesto. Av. Independencia 130, Miraflores; 511/249-5533; manifiesto.pe
Maras. Las Begonias , cnr. Amador Merino Reyna, San Isidro; 511/201-5023; marasrestaurante.com.pe
Nanka. Jr. Bambúes 198, La Molina; 511/369-7297.
Picas. Calle Bajada de Baños 340, Barranco; 511/252-8095; picas.com.pe
Restaurant Sonia. Calle Santa Rosa 173, Chorrillos; 511/467-3788; restaurantsonia.com

further information
Contact Prom Perú for tips on eating your way around Lima. peru.travel