Guillermo Payet is visiting Peru for only the third time since fleeing 15 years ago at the height of the Shining Path insurgency. Sitting in Lima’s crowded Astrid y Gastón restaurant next to chef-owner Gastón Acurio, Payet’s close friend from the old days, he bites into a delicately lacquered shrimp and closes his eyes. “That taste ...” he murmurs, searching. Then the eyes flash open: “Melcocha! Those candies from school.”
Acurio shakes his dark curls yes, and both men smile at the memory of the old man who sold homemade molasses taffy from a wooden box at their elementary school. The dish, infancia, is Acurio’s story of his childhood: peanuts from the ball game, molasses candies from school, and camarones and tamarind from Sunday Chinese dinners. It’s his playful take on chifa, Lima’s widespread, peppery, 150-year-old version of Cantonese cuisine.
Here at Astrid y Gastón, with its tiled floors, contemporary Peruvian art, and walls the color of sachatomates, or tree tomatoes, the stories keep coming. The next plated tale, in the form of a classic ceviche of wild sea bass with lime and red onions, is about people who have long caught fish in the morning and had a taboo against eating it later than lunch, celebrating the catch at midday in one of the city’s thousands of noisy, thatch-roofed cevicherias. “A cevicheria is more than food—it’s an ambiance, a happy mood, a whole world,” says Acurio, offering me a tangy bite from his own fork.
Each of Acurio’s dishes is an homage to and a reinvention of one of this country’s many traditional worlds of cooking. A tiradito, sliced raw bonito, is Acurio’s interpretation of Peru’s nikkei, or second-generation Japanese, cuisine. His bright-orange erizos—sea urchins on tender ribbons of raw calamari—recall one of the nikkei pioneers, Nobu Matsuhisa, who in the ’70s blended Peruvian spices with Japanese sushi and popularized ingredients limeños had never considered, prying sea urchins away from confused fishermen by explaining they were for his dog. Tuna skewers are Acurio’s nod to Lima’s street vendors, who sell anticuchos—usually beef-heart kebabs—from streetside carts. A stuffed pepper recalls Arequipa’s picanteria cuisine, while risotto with black scallops speaks of the African-inflected criollo food still served in most homes. “In Peru, we have twelve different cultural and regional cuisines,” explains Acurio. “Depending on what I want to talk about in a dish, I can use any of those dozen stories.”
For Payet, the flavors of these dishes heighten his sense of everything in Peru being familiar but entirely new. Fifteen years ago, when he left, no one dared to mix the various distinct cuisines in Peru. There was no such thing as novoandino cooking, much less 12 cooking schools in Lima with classes by that name. The country was politically and geographically isolated, so that little of its astonishing variety of foods—tropical fruits from the Amazon, wild mushrooms from the Sacred Valley, black scallops from northern lakes, 3,000 varieties of potatoes—showed up in the markets here. Even when they did, limeños disdained ingredients from the Andes, considering them peasant food. “When I grew up, if you ate guinea pig you were a savage,” Payet says, biting into a leg of roasted organic guinea pig nestled in its bed of oca ravioli in a pecan sauce with Pisco (Peru’s brandy).
When Acurio, 38, and Payet, 42, were kids, people who ate out at restaurants—almost exclusively the white upper class—were only interested in fine French or Italian fare. When Acurio opened Astrid y Gastón, in 1994, he was fresh from Paris (Le Cordon Bleu) and had every intention of serving French haute cuisine. As the son of a former prime minister (who thought Acurio was spending all that time overseas learning to be a lawyer), he was aiming at the Eurocentric upper class. “I wanted to teach Peruvians to eat foie gras and truffles.” He ignored traditional Peruvian cuisines and ingredients. “I was fighting to get dried porcini mushrooms and didn’t see the fifty varieties of fruit we have right here.”
But things had changed in Peru while Acurio was gone. The publisher of the daily newspaper El Comercio, Bernardo Roca Rey, an avid amateur cook, had experimented with underused, undervalued native ingredients and created new dishes with them, like a quinotto, a risotto made of Andean quinoa. A chef named Cucho La Rosa opened El Comensal, the first novoandino restaurant, and then Roca Rey’s daughter Hirka Roca Rey followed suit with Pantagruel. (Both restaurants, “ahead of their time,” Acurio says, have closed.) Serious cooks with European training began taking a look at Peru’s native fruits, tubers, grains, and animals and using them to create sophisticated new recipes. Roca Rey proclaimed it a movement, and as the head of an empire that brought daily food columns and inexpensive new cookbooks to newspaper subscribers every few weeks, he made it so. He and others recognized Acurio’s creativity, and tried to steer him into the fold. “I told Gastón not to imitate the French,” says Cucho La Rosa, “but to make a cuisine that is Peruvian.”
Acurio and other cooks of his generation took the advice to heart. “We were doing French cuisine, but we were Peruvians, and you have to follow your Peruvian personality.” That personality is bold; whether nikkei, chifa, or criollo, what all the imported Peruvian cuisines have in common (besides ají peppers) is flavors that are stronger than the original. It’s also more willing to experiment. “Because we’re a poor country, we’ve been inventive. We have more than three hundred soups and four hundred ceviches,” Acurio says. “We’re a mix of cultures, and we don’t close our culinary frontiers.” It was a relief for Acurio to acknowledge his roots. “In France, they told me my minestrone wasn’t any good, because it wasn’t French,” he says. “But believe me, it was good.”
Acurio spent a year traveling all over Peru in search of ingredients and flavors, and was amazed at what he found. “We’re only eating five percent of our produce.” He began the slow work of sourcing the best ingredients and training producers to bring him what he wanted. “At first, the farmer, dumping everything from one big sack, thought I was crazy when I asked him to put potatoes in one bag and herbs in the other, so they wouldn’t get crushed.” Back in Lima—starting off with creative cocktails featuring Pisco and Amazonian fruits—Astrid y Gastón’s nouvelle Peruvian cuisine quickly took off. Now Acurio is a celebrity; he stars in a weekly cooking show, has written 12 cookbooks, and has opened ten restaurants throughout South America—and he’s planning new cevicherias in Ft. Lauderdale and, he says, all over the world.
For all the movement’s influence, Acurio doesn’t consider himself a novoandino cook, because he doesn’t stick too close to Peruvian roots. “It’s good to value ethnic Peruvian products, but it’s a prison to only use things native to Peru. I don’t care if asparagus wasn’t born here, it’s good grown here.” As for alpaca, which novoandino cooking champions but which can taste tough and nasty, Acurio shakes his head emphatically. “I’m a Peruvian,” he says, “but first I’m a chef.”
At the Surquillo market, near Miraflores, the tony neighborhood where Payet and Acurio grew up, Payet makes a wide gesture at the produce. “You can see why I was horrified when I first went to the grocery stores in the States,” he says. Here are countless baskets of potatoes—red, fat, black, and bright orange with pink spots. There’s purple corn and yellow cobs with kernels as big as horse’s teeth. At another stand are colorful piles of tropical fruits, most of which I don’t recognize. “This is why I started LocalHarvest,” Payet says, referring to his website, which is the largest database of family farmers in the U.S., where people can log on to find local farmers markets and products. He likes his food so local he keeps chickens in his backyard in Santa Cruz, California.
Before I met Payet, I didn’t know anything about Peruvian food. I assumed it was like Mexican food, but with more potatoes. He turned me on to dishes I’d never heard of—a peppery chicken stew called ají de gallina, a beef and tomato dish with french fries stirred in called lomo saltado—and ones he made better than anyone else, like green tamales with chicharrones. We share a passion for food, and a birthday, and each year we cook our hearts out to celebrate. Over the years, tasting his Peruvian dishes, I’ve nudged him to go back—and to take me with him—on a culinary tour.
It was difficult for Payet to return to Peru, partly because the circumstances of his leaving had been traumatic. Terrorists had bombed his office, and only quick talking had saved him from death in the Andes when he encountered the Shining Path. He went to the States; others of his generation went to Europe, where many of them learned the culinary techniques that they are now incorporating into the Peruvian cooking revolution back home.
After our dinner at Astrid y Gastón—a comprehensive introduction to new Peruvian cuisine in one meal—we decide to take apart the menu, in a sense, trying out several of the components. We start with a classic street-vendor breakfast, but in a spiffed-up location: Santa Ana, a small café in posh San Isidro. With coffee and glasses of fresh papaya juice, we eat typical breakfast sandwiches: lomo de cerdo ahumado (pork sirloin sausage cured with hot peppers and paprika) and chicharrones with yam. Over corn cakes (pasteles de choclo) and tamales, the chef, Pablo Secada, tells us that he cooks from old family recipes, and he compares notes with Payet on how to cook tamale masa in broth. They discover they both have a favorite old Peruvian cookbook, one with a recipe that begins, “The day before, you kill the animals and wash them well.”
We make our way through foggy, dirty-faced Lima to a tropical bright spot for lunch: a typical cevicheria, La Isla Escondida. There we are greeted with plastic cups of Pisco Sour at the door, and by eight of Payet’s childhood friends, who’ve eaten here or at another cevicheria every Friday since high school. Under thatched roofs, with bright plastic fish decorating the walls, we devour plate after plate of ceviches—there are 31 on the menu—along with varieties of tacu tacu, rice-and-bean dishes, and causas, which are various fish, olive, and sauce concoctions on top of a base of cold mashed potatoes. One of Payet’s friends, on his fifth or sixth beer, nudges me during the ever more boisterous meal. “This,” he says, poking a fish on the plate, “was alive this morning.”
At dinnertime, we settle in at Toshiro’s, a Japanese restaurant in San Isidro. Improbably located next to a cheesy casino, it is spare and serene, with windows facing an outdoor garden of hanging bromeliads. A photo inside places chef Toshiro Konishi alongside Nobu and Australia’s Tetsuya Wakuda, and the meal, though simple, turns out to be the best Japanese meal I’ve had since I dined at Tetsuya’s. Tender, flavorful raw fish is mixed with Peruvian ingredients in dishes like salmon with flying-fish roe and maca root from the Andes. Dessert is an ice cream of my new favorite fruit, the subtle, caramel-flavored, divine lúcuma. “Bestial,” says Payet, his highest compliment.
The next morning, we meet up with Acurio at T’anta, where he makes Spanish-style tapas with Peruvian ingredients (mini potato causas, stuffed baby peppers, fried yuca with peppery salsa huancaína). Then we are off to his cevicheria, La Mar, for a Pisco Sour, gorgeous ceviches, causas, tiraditos, and deep-fried fresh bottarga, in an upscale version of the traditional thatched-roof restaurant. In the evening, Acurio recommends Malabár, a nouvelle Peruvian restaurant where chef Pedro Miguel Schiaffino uses many of the fruits and vegetables he has researched in the Amazon. Like Acurio, he trained in Europe—in Mantua, Italy. “It didn’t make sense for me to come back to Peru and make regional Italian cuisine,” he says. At 29, he sees Peruvian cuisine as having infinite potential. “In France and Italy, they have hundreds of years’ worth of master chefs. We have Toshiro, who is our master, and we have Gastón, who is young. But it’s an exciting start. Peruvians are beginning to appreciate their own foods.”
Payet spends his time during the trip in a state of wonder. “There’s so much variety now,” he tells me. “All these ingredients I knew from traveling in the Andes or the Amazon, but never saw on the coast in Lima—now they’re making it to restaurants and to people’s tables. Everyone’s experimenting.”
We have our last meal in Lima’s crowded Chinatown, at Acurio’s favorite chifa, Salon Capon. The food has a different accent than Chinese food from the States—there is no soy sauce, more peppers. One of Peru’s favorite dishes, lomo saltado, was originally a chifa stir-fry. As we eat a tender whole rockfish, eggplant with dried fish and sausage, and fried wontons, a girl of about eight comes up to speak to Acurio. “She told me she wants to grow up to be a chef,” he says, with a proud smile. “That wouldn’t have happened ten years ago.”
Acurio’s cellphone rings; he checks his watch and pops another piece of calamari into this mouth before leaving. “In another ten years, Lima will be like Paris,” he says. “People will come here just to eat.”
Payet and I exchange satisfied nods. We will definitely come back to Lima to eat, and then head out—to the Andes, the Amazon, the Ica Pisco region, mystical Machu Picchu, or the desert with its giant animal-figure Nazca lines—into a country that is almost as vast, varied, and unexplored as its cuisine.