Food in Peru as diverse as the landscape
Lima is now a culinary destination
To some folks (me!), the thriller in Peru is not Machu Picchu but Lima’s food scene. Peru and Lima, in particular, have been astonishing international food hounds for some time now and prompted Ferran Adria (the Spanish genius behind the late, great El Bulli restaurant) to announce the future of gastronomy is Peru where food is nothing less than a religion.
I was there for three and a half weeks recently and even through the fog of sickness for two weeks (altitude sickness, then a cold and cough), I appreciated the food, richly imbued with the depth of pre-colonial history and the breadth of a wild and dramatic geography. From meals at a homestay with a farming family off Lake Titicaca to the temples of gastronomy in Lima, I fell in love with the food culture.
Lima is one of four world cities (with New York, Mexico City, London) that in recent years landed three restaurants on the hallowed World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. This year, Limeno chef, Virgilio Martinez, took The Chef’s Choice award, an honour bestowed by fellow chefs at the World’s 50 Best, for “propelling Peru’s status as a foodie destination to new heights.”
We panted for a reservation at Martinez’s restaurant, Central, named the best in Latin America and fifth best in the world in the 2017 World’s 50 Best Restaurants. Reservations are taken in four-month blocks, starting 30 days before that period. At midnight, my husband was on the computer, the starting block to book a table. Hours later, we were in!
Alas, we were too late to book at Astrid Y Gaston, another Lima restaurant we’d loved to have tried but its rock star owner/chef Gaston Acurio has scores of other restaurants around Peru and so we went on a ‘Where’s Gaston’ hunt and ate at five of them. Every one, casual and affordable, were excellent and memorable. Martinez studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa and London and was executive chef at Astrid y Gaston in Bogota and Madrid.
Central offers four tasting menus — 11 or 17 courses, vegetarian or non-vegetarian — and everyone at the table must order the same menu. We opted for the 11-course non-vegetarian, about $140 per person, before beverages, ozonated water, bread and tip. (Comparable meals in the U.S. would have cost a lot more.)
Martinez is obsessed with showcasing Peru and all of its biodiversity on his dishes. Rene Redzepi of the famous Noma restaurant in Copenhagen might have jump-started the local foraging craze but Martinez took it to an insane level; he regularly scours the heights and depths of Peru, from the Andes to the Amazon to the ocean, in search of edibles, often dating back to pre-Incan times. After poisoning himself in his enthusiasm to discover new ingredients, he and his physician sister Malena started up a research facility, Mater Iniciativa for a more scientific approach. They work with locals, geographers, historians, anthropologists, ecologists, chefs and his test kitchen staff sometimes labours for months to parlay discoveries into amazing dishes.
Each course on his tasting menus indicate the altitudes where main ingredients are found. And as someone sucker-punched with altitude sickness at 15,000 feet in the Colca Canyon before recovering in the steamy Amazon jungle, I can say there’s a whole lot of altitude in Peru.
During our Central meal, we dove 10 metres into the sea (sea snails, mussel, limpet, sargassum seaweed, octopus, crab, squid, sea lettuce) and soared 3,000 metres skyward with exotic ingredients like congona, matico, malva and chincho.
The meal required hand-holding at times lest we mistakenly ate the props like raw potatoes, fungus, shells, rocks — placed to enlighten us. The first course, Rock Mollusks featured cold mollusk shells looking like little snake heads in a bowl. Not edible, thankfully. The edible parts were algae crackers perched on lava rock (not edible) and mussel mousse to spread on the crackers.
The second course, Thick Stems, had a triangular dish holding small and bright red raw tubers. It was a display of olluco from the Andes with a watery, slippery texture. For eating, there was deep-fried olluco and a beverage made with it.
I have no idea what River Scales was. I noted shrimp tartar served in leaves but didn’t get what the server was saying about dehydrated fish scales and an extraction from a tree.
High Jungle featured three breads, made with air potato (which grows on trees and looks like a fungus). Another was made with cassava and another, with macambo, a relative of cacao which indigenous people have used for centuries for energy.
Sea Coral looked like coral with ocean foam in a dark green sea but it was octopus with sea urchin foam, purple corn ‘coral’, crab chips and sea lettuce sauce.
Unfortunately, we missed explanations of the exotic dishes because the waiters weren’t comfortable speaking English. Suffice to say, the food is like modern edible art with a Peruvian heart and soul, prepared with tweezer-placed precision.
Many of the ingredients were as new to me as they probably are to the people of Lima. These are but a few: olluco (a root vegetable, a staple of the Incas), huampo (the boiled bark of this tree is traditionally used as medicine), sacha culantro (a herb found in the jungle), piscorunto (a variety of corn), gamitana (tropical freshwater fish), and pacae (pods of this tree contain something that looks like cotton). It’s not simply the serendipity of found ingredients. Martinez spins them into something futuristically unique.
Martinez also runs Lima and Lima Floral in London which showcases Peru’s diversity but not to the extent as at Central. This year, he opened a third Lima restaurant in Dubai.
Copenhagen collaboration
Farmer’s Apprentice’s David Gunawan teams up with Copenhagen chef Jonatham Tam of Michelin-starred Relae on July 19. Tam worked at Noma before moving to Relae, which took No. 39 spot on the 2017 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for its “no-nonsense approach to fine dining and deceptively simple dishes that maximize the flavour of just a few ingredients, served in a stripped back dining room by a young, friendly team.”
Tickets are $150 per person, inclusive of a multi-course menu with wine pairings, tax and gratuity. For tickets, go to farmersapprentice.ca/events