South American chefs
Latin American chefs are digging deep into their roots and referencing their cultural heritage to reinvent traditional fare for fine dining, reports karen tee
CAIMAN, CAPYBARA AND PIRARUCU. Such inhabitants of the dense Amazon rainforest are rarely glimpsed outside their natural habitat. These days, though, adventurous foodies can experience them on the plate at Leo, the namesake fine-dining restaurant of Colombian chef Leonor Espinosa in the country’s sprawling capital, Bogotá.
In Espinosa’s deft hands, a sliver of caiman (a reptile similar to an alligator) meat, the most delicate of its kind I’ve ever tasted, is painstakingly wrapped around a reduction of cassava extract and cooked in a bowl of peachpalm custard. Pirarucu, one of the world’s largest freshwater fish, is marinated with sour yucca, cacay nut and ojo de pez pepper and resembles ceviche with the texture of chicken sashimi. And capybara, the world’s largest rodent and an Amazonian delicacy, is cooked in a rich, meaty stew with native red beans and garnished with a strip of crispy crackling. Its gamey flavour, reminiscent of pork and rabbit, packs an umami punch that’s familiar yet foreign all at once.
By the end of my 15-course Ciclo-Bioma dinner at Leo – ranked 18 on the S.Pellegrino list of Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants – it’s as if I’d gone on a whirlwind trip through the country’s diverse ecosystem. Widely regarded as the high priestess of fine Colombian cuisine, Espinosa has made it her life’s mission to introduce her country’s bounty of exotic flora, fauna and gastronomic traditions to the rest of the world. “My idea was to take traditional dishes and introduce them to a wider public, without losing the essence of what they were originally about,” she says.
Throughout Latin America, many of the region’s culinary stars are embracing a similar ethos by aiming to nourish, satisfy and educate the palate in a single meal. In Lima, arguably the gastronomic capital of the continent, chef Virgilio Martinez of Central restaurant is quite rightly the wizard-scientist of Peru.
His exploration of the country’s immense biodiversity has resulted in a menu featuring ingredients sourced from a mind-boggling range of altitudes, from 20 metres below sea level to 4,100 metres up in the mountains. It’s probably the only restaurant in the world where one can feast on crispy piranha skin as well as heritage potatoes and tubers (with a side of shaved alpaca heart) from the Andes mountains in a single seating.
Equally illuminating, though somewhat more underrated, is the food by chef Mitsuharu Tsumura. His Japanese-Peruvian dishes at the stylish Maido restaurant in Lima – first on the Latin American and eighth on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants lists – are a vivid embodiment of fusion food at its best. Termed Nikkei cuisine,