How Peruvian Food Became a Global Star
Ceviche, quinoa, sushi — the nation’s kaleidoscopic culinary traditions are earning popularity and prestige around the world.
By Julia Moskin
The chef Gaston Acurio, who has become a national hero in Peru for promoting the country’s cuisine worldwide, greeted fans in New York City last month with plates of ceviche. Credit...Janice Chung for The New York TimesWhen the Peruvian-born restaurateur Humberto Leon was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s, his high-school classmates had barely heard of Peru, much less its cuisine.
“People thought it was the same place as Puerto Rico,” he said.
“If you met another Peruvian, you would hug them, and immediately start talking about food.”
Today, that conversation has gone global.
Peruvian food has pulled off the culinary coup of becoming both popular and prestigious around the world.
Last year, Central, in Peru’s capital, Lima, landed at No. 1 on the influential World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, the first time a South American restaurant had joined destinations like Eleven Madison Park, Noma and El Bulli at the top.
Months later, the United Nations chimed in, placing Peruvian ceviche on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage traditions, alongside Neapolitan pizza and Korean kimchi.
Restaurants that spotlight Peruvian classics, Peruvian-style sushi and cocktails based on pisco (the clear liquor made from grapes in Peru’s wine country) have proliferated in Miami, New York City, California and Spain.
The international acclaim that has powered this “boom gastronomica” feels overdue to many Peruvians, for whom their unique national cuisine is a point of pride and unity.
The country’s biodiversity — it’s a birthplace of modern corn, potatoes, tomatoes and chiles — has long been considered extraordinary.
So has its cultural and culinary diversity.
In the 200 years since Peru gained independence from Spain and began welcoming immigrant workers, its indigenous ingredients — tropical fruits, mountain grains like quinoa and seafood from 1,500 miles of Pacific coast — have merged with soy sauce and French fries, sashimi and pesto into a cuisine that isn’t quite like any other.
The person most responsible for all the new attention, the 57-year-old Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio, showed up at the James Beard Foundation in New York last month for a whirlwind demonstration of ceviche, using halibut, oysters and sea urchin.
While blending a leche de tigre — the citrusy, spicy brine that gives ceviche its flavor, and acts as a hangover cure and reputed aphrodisiac — Mr. Acurio reminisced about his early days as a chef, introducing ceviche to wide-eyed foreign diners.
Peruvian ceviche, lime- and salt-cured fish, is traditionally served as a meal with garnishes of raw onion, sweet potato and crunchy corn.Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times
“They asked me, do you still have tigers in Peru?”
Mr. Acurio now has 70 restaurants, including nine locations of his cebichería La Mar, stretching from Dubai to the American Dream Mall in New Jersey to Bellevue, Wash.
Because of him and the Peruvian chefs who followed his path — Virgilio Martínez, Pia León, Mitsuhara Tsumura, Jorge Muñoz and many more — the nation has been transformed into a world-class destination for culinary thrill-seekers, and has earned respect at the top of the global food chain, which had long been reserved for European cuisines.
Mr. Acurio’s appearance at the Beard Foundation brought out dozens of star-struck expatriates.
In a 2014 poll of likely voters in Peru’s 2016 presidential election, 23 percent said they would vote for Mr. Acurio if he ran. (He didn’t.)
“What he did for Peruvian food, I want to do for art and music,” said Karla Prieto, who is from the Andean city Huancayo and moved to New York to study for an advanced degree in arts management.
(Peruvian Q-pop, K-pop-style bops that incorporate Quechuan instruments and language, is most likely to break out, she said.)
Outside the Andes, “nobody had heard of quinoa 20 years ago, even in Peru” said Henry Urrunaga, a content creator from Lima who lives in Brooklyn, as he crunched on a dessert of frozen chocolate-lucuma mousse topped with crisped tricolor quinoa and served in a Peruvian cacao pod.
“Now it’s everywhere.”
That includes the United States, thanks to young Peruvian American chefs like Erik Ramirez of Llama Inn and Llama San in New York, JuanMa Calderón at Celeste and La Royal in Boston, and the siblings Valerie and Nando Chang of Maty’s and Itamae AO in Miami.
They have moved on from the conventional goal of presenting authentic Peruvian food — especially because procuring fresh ingredients like ají amarillo, lucuma and huacatay remains difficult — and are writing a new script.
The chef Erik Ramirez, shown here at his popular Williamsburg restaurant Llama Inn, is a leader in modern Peruvian American cuisine. Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times
His playful, creative food at Llama Inn is so popular — and global — that there are now branches in Madrid and London. Credit...Janice Chung for The New York Times“It can still be authentic to you,” said Ms. Chang, who grew up in Chiclayo in northern Peru, moved to Florida in 2001 at age 8 and trained at Pakta, the upscale Peruvian restaurant in Barcelona opened by Spain’s star-chef brothers, Ferran and Albert Adrià.
Last year, she and her brother appeared together on Food & Wine magazine’s “Best New Chefs” list, for his adventurous Japanese-Peruvian omakase bar, Itamae AO, which is tucked inside her modern-Peruvian-grandma restaurant Maty’s.
(This year, she won the James Beard award for best chef in the American South.)
Lomo saltado, a classic dish from the Chinese-Peruvian cuisine called chifa, is a stir-fry of soy-marinated beef, tomato and onions that is often topped with French fries; hers is made with fresh herbs, roasted Peruvian potatoes and chunks of braised oxtail.
Mr. Ramirez opened the cheerful, inventive Llama Inn in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2015; it is so popular that it now has satellites in Madrid and London.
Llama San in the West Village of Manhattan followed, with a serene vibe and thoughtful menu that won three stars from The New York Times when it opened in 2019.
He was recruited by New York real estate giant Tishman Speyer to open his next restaurant, Papa San, in 2025 in Hudson Yards.
Mr. Ramirez was raised by Peruvian-immigrant parents near the large Peruvian community in Paterson, N.J.
But during three years as a sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park, he said, it never occurred to him that the food he grew up with would become the basis of his professional success.
The siblings Nando and Valerie Chang, who grew up in northern Peru, needed two restaurants to incorporate all the Peruvian, Chinese, Latin and Japanese influences on their cooking. Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York Times
The signature Peruvian-influenced dishes at Maty’s, in Miami, include, from left, an elegant scallop ceviche with grapes, a simple whole grilled fish; and a modern version of the Chinese-Peruvian classic lomo saltado. Credit...Alfonso Duran for The New York TimesHe would cook Peruvian food when it was his turn to make the staff meal, he said.
“I wasn’t thinking about getting it on the menu.
I just didn’t want to mess up my mother’s recipes.”
Another restaurateur, Mr. Leon, took an indirect route to the kitchen that began in 1975, when he was born in Los Angeles on a flight layover between Hong Kong (his mother’s home) and Peru (his father’s).
That allowed the family to immigrate to the United States, where he became a leading designer at Gap and Burberry and co-founded the edgy fashion brand Opening Ceremony.
When Opening Ceremony closed all its stores during the pandemic, Mr. Leon had time to fulfill a long-held family dream: to give his mother a chance to recreate the popular chifa restaurant she ran in Lima.
At Chifa, in the Eagle Rock section of Los Angeles, there’s a wood-fired grill for roasting Cantonese-style pork (char siu) and Peruvian pollo a la brasa, which Mr. Leon called a “gateway dish” to the cuisine.
And every week, Wendy Leon still hand-makes dozens of zongzi, sticky-rice bundles in bamboo leaves, for the restaurant.
Peru’s national cuisine has been shaped by stories like these, knitting together influences from the sophisticated agriculture of the ancient Moche culture, the Incas’ imperial kitchens, and the invasion and centuries of occupation by Spain that also brought enslaved people from Africa to build fortunes on sugar, rice and rubber.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the newly independent republic of Peru worked to attract the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers needed to build its infrastructure.
Because of that immigration, more than 70 percent of the country’s 34 million people have roots in Japan, China, Africa, Europe or the Middle East, according to 2024 statistics from the Peruvian government.
Peru was the first country in the Americas to welcome Japanese immigrant workers, and the culinary assimilation of Japanese ingredients and techniques is enshrined in the food called Nikkei.
The ever-growing global popularity of sushi has provided an extra boost to Peruvian food around the world, laying the groundwork for other raw-fish dishes like ceviche and crudo.
Many big-ticket diners got their first taste of Peruvian dishes from the chef Nobu Matsuhisa, who made a three-year stop in Lima en route from Japan to the United States.
He went on to build his global Nobu restaurant empire on Latin-influenced dishes like hamachi with jalapeño, and now even non-Peruvians can knowledgeably discuss the difference between ceviche (the chunky classic, with garnishes of sweet potato and crunchy corn) and tiradito (the more austere Japanese-Peruvian style, sliced like sashimi and dressed at the last minute with lime and salt.)
But it took more than great chefs to push Peruvian cuisine into the spotlight.
To bring his mother’s cooking to 21st-century Los Angeles, Mr. Leon built a wood-fired grill for dishes like Cantonese barbecued pork and Peruvian pollo a la brasa.Credit...Michelle Groskopf for The New York Times
In the early 2000s, as the nation tried to recover from the disastrous coup of 1992 and the decade of instability that followed, the new government latched onto cuisine as a valuable strand of Peruvian culture, both at home and abroad.
“Rebranding Peru was a priority,” said Raúl Matta, a Paris-based expert on Peruvian culinary diplomacy and anthropology.
He said that well-heeled, well-connected Peruvian chefs like Mr. Acurio, whose father was a senator, were watching the food revolution taking place around the world.
Mr. Acurio had opened his flagship restaurant in Lima, Astrid y Gaston, as a mostly French restaurant in 1994, after training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
But French cuisine was losing its iron grip on fine dining, respect for Asian culinary techniques was deepening and Spanish modernism was on the rise.
The New Nordic movement, with its insistence on hyperlocal ingredients, no matter how underused, encouraged Peruvian chefs to explore the countless indigenous fruits, vegetables and herbs that have become a signature.
Soon, they joined the ranks of globe-trotting chefs like David Chang and René Redzepi, attending conferences, staging guest-chef pop-ups and collaborations, and documenting it all on social media.
It worked.
The government’s tourism wing and the trade organization Promperu now pour money into promoting Peru’s agricultural traditions and products.
Lima has three restaurants on this year’s 50 Best list, as many as Tokyo.
(New York City has one.)
Mexico City, São Paulo and other Latin American cities have also risen in the rankings, making the entire region increasingly appealing and accessible to gastrotourists.
Ms. Chang, the Miami chef, said she grasped the specialness of Peru’s cultural mix only after she moved to the United States, and its culinary mix only after years in professional kitchens.
“In Peru, no one ever asks about your ethnicity, or whether your food is Peruvian or Chinese or Japanese,” she said.
“We just know we are lucky to tell this great food story.”
Julia Moskin covers everything related to restaurants, chefs, food and cooking for The Times.
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario