When 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, 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 flavour, and acts as a hangover cure and reputed aphrodisiac — Acurio reminisced about his early days as a chef, introducing ceviche to wide-eyed foreign diners.
“They asked me, do you still have tigers in Peru?” Acurio now has 70 restaurants, including nine locations of his cebichería La Mar, stretching from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to the American Dream Mall in New Jersey to Bellevue, Washington.
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.
Outside the Andes, “nobody had heard of quinoa 20 years ago, even in Peru,” Henry Urrunaga, a content creator from Lima who lives in New York, said 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 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.
“It can still be authentic to you,” said Valerie Chang, who grew up in Chiclayo in northern Peru, moved to Florida in 2001 at age 8 and trained at Pakta, an upscale Peruvian restaurant in Barcelona opened by Spain’s star-chef brothers, Ferran and Albert Adrià.
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 per cent 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.
Chang 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.” — The New York Times
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