The capital's achievement – four spots on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list – owes as much to the credit of the indigenous people as to the creativity of the chefs
“I wish I had more time to spend just listening,” says Martinez, 46, who was honored this year as the creator of the world's best restaurant. “Every time I do it, I learn something new.”
The men stand in a field overlooking the Moray, a massive pre-Columbian basin of concentric layers excavated into the mountainside above the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru.
Believed to have been used as an agricultural laboratory, the Murray is home to a surprising effect: when you step into the bowl, the temperature rises. Modern researchers believe that the Incas used terrace rings to acclimate crops to different heights for their highly vertical empire.
Murray is where Martinez built the center for his Mater Initiative, a contemporary culinary think tank grounded in the study of local traditions and ecological knowledge, which has helped catapult the chef to rock star status in the gastronomic world. In June, Central, Martinez's flagship restaurant in Lima, was named #1 among the world's 50 best restaurants, arguably the most influential list in the industry. It has been ranked in the top ten for years.
This honor, voted on by more than 1,000 global experts, has cemented Peru's place on the culinary map. Central, with its innovative tasting menu showcasing Peru's stunning geography and biodiversity, led a pack of four Lima restaurants in the top 50 – more than any other city in the world.
The way the gastronomic scene in Peru's troubled, underdeveloped capital has triumphed over major powers like Paris and New York owes much to the personal talent and drive of Martinez and Lima's other fine chefs. But it's no coincidence that they're from Peru, and their creations are shaped in this South American country's indigenous and highly diverse national food culture, a culture that's finally being recognized as one of the world's greats.
Wherever you go here, Peruvians of all races and classes not only love to eat, but they also love to talk about food, with countless delicious options to suit all budgets. Most recipes can only be found in Peru; They are always made with fresh ingredients.
“The food is the best thing in Peru,” says fruit seller Pamela Clemente, 32, as she eats ceviche, Peru’s national dish, at a street market in Lima’s sandy La Victoria district. “We have a lot of dishes and ingredients.” .
“I don’t know what Peru would be like without our cooking,” she says. “We will have no country left.”
In a society whose self-esteem has been damaged by rampant corruption, political dysfunction, the world's highest coronavirus death rate and the national soccer team's serial failures, the kitchen is the only lasting source of collective pride, says anthropologist Alexandre Huerta Mercado. And absolute joy.
“Most Peruvians have never been to Machu Picchu before,” says Huerta Mercado, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “But the food is different. Any foreigner in Peru will immediately be asked if they like the food. You're not supposed to say no. Chefs are the culture heroes here. Everyone wants to be one.”
The Martinez Center, which opened just before the pandemic, brings together chefs, botanists, anthropologists, artists and others to explore new and sustainable ways to harness and use delicious and nutritious ingredients from the Andes, Amazon and Pacific Coast.
Farmer Cosipaucar and other locals work on three acres of land next to the moray, harvesting endemic produce such as oloco and machua tubers, and herbs such as huacatay, a local amaranth used extensively in Peruvian cooking. Villagers keep half of the produce; The rest goes to Mil's, Martínez's little restaurant here, and Central.
Kucibukar, 58 years old, grows 50 varieties of potatoes, but he can market only four of them, due to the lack of commercial demand. Martinez told that he counted 80 Andean plants, traditionally consumed for food and medicine, that had fallen out of use among neighboring communities. “It's my biggest worry,” he says. “We will lose them forever.”
Martinez nodded and promised to list the threatened species in the Mater Botanical Garden. “Tell me which plants and which seeds,” he says. “We totally agree. We can help you.”
Martinez's relationships with artisanal suppliers such as kusipaucar, Pacific fishermen and indigenous communities in the Amazon, have shaped Centrale's tasting menu, Mundo en Desnivel — loosely speaking, World on a Slope.
Heavily plant-based, this dish takes diners on a whirlwind journey through Peru, noting for each of the 14 courses the altitude at which the ingredients were harvested—and, in many cases, sourced from the wild. All the while, Martinez delights in throwing diners curve balls with unexpected combinations and tastes that belie the appearance of the food.
Highlights include a dish called “Warm Sea,” from 15 meters below sea level on Peru’s northern coast, a breezy broth of grouper with crispy clams and aji limo, a fiery Peruvian pepper; The extreme altitude, from 4,200 meters above sea level in the Altiplano, with five types of corn, crunchy Andean amaranth seeds and delicate sweet potato leaves; And the waters of the Amazon, from 190 meters above sea level, with processed pacu, a herbivorous cousin of the carnivorous river piranha, watermelon slices, coconut foam and coca (yes, the basis of cocaine).
In the elegant, dark salon in Lima's bohemian district of Barranco, diners can see about a dozen chefs in black shirts and aprons, some from as far away as France and Spain, through a long window overlooking minimal stainless steel. kitchen.
The atmosphere of congenial competence is a far cry from the bullying made famous in restaurant documentaries. Martinez says he tried such cuisine in London. There, he worked “with fear,” a feeling he says contradicts the “meaning” he is now trying to construct.
Martinez's creations violate Peruvian traditions. They are light, even airy, and their flavors are kept subtle to avoid one course overpowering another. Traditional Peruvian cooking is all about bold, intense flavours, including indigenous chile peppers.
Many of the country's most famous dishes – aji di galena, a korma-like chicken recipe; arroz con mariscos, a paella-influenced seafood rice dish; And the wide range of deserts, a legacy of French influence – is best described as comfort food.
Peru's culinary excellence is due in part to its vast natural storehouse. Its equatorial latitude, with large differences in elevation from the peaks of the Andes to the Pacific coast, hosts almost every type of ecosystem, and thus crops and livestock, on Earth. This is known to include more than 4,000 types of potatoes, but also all kinds of herbs, grains, legumes and products new to most foreigners. Furthermore, Peru's Pacific waters are exceptionally prolific, thanks to the plankton-rich Humboldt Current.
Peruvian food – or “fighting” in local vernacular – incorporates a range of influences, from distinct indigenous traditions on the coast, in the mountains and in the rainforest, to waves of migration, voluntary and involuntary, from Spain, Africa, Italy and China. and Japan, among others. This combination of geography and history explains the primitive soup that gave rise to Peruvian cuisine. But no one has been able to pinpoint the lightning strike that sparked her to life.
Huerta Mercado has a theory.
Peru's culinary genius, he says, is the result of the “instability” of life in an anarchic society with an incomplete rule of law. “There is no tomorrow, and no concept of the future,” he says. “Peruvians live in the constant present, and we need instant gratification and sensory overload.”
Some of these influences can be seen in ceviche. Believed to have pre-Columbian roots, it was once cured with the juice of citrus local fruits, including tombo, known in English as the passion fruit banana. Today tombo has been replaced by lime, introduced by the Spanish conquistadors. Large pieces of fish, served with large corn kernels and steamed sweet potatoes, are a later addition, taken from sashimi brought over by the Japanese in the early 1900s.
Peru's next most famous national dish, lomo saltado, consists of sirloin steak fried in a pan with sliced tomatoes and red onions and flavored with soy sauce, cumin and aji amarillo, a mild yellow chile pepper unique to Peru. The classic platter includes rice and fatty fries made from crushed and absorbent Peruvian yellow potatoes. But there's also a version with taco taco, a hearty Afro-Peruvian mixture of rice and beans seasoned with pork fat.
Traditionally, many of these recipes were made exclusively at home. The model for fine dining was French cuisine. Lima's largely white elite looked down upon local recipes, even seafood, a cornerstone of contemporary Peruvian cuisine.
But in the past two decades, a generation of young chefs has returned from culinary schools in Europe, North America, Japan and beyond to train their new skills and techniques in traditional Peruvian home cooking, reclaiming working-class standards and giving them new life. Martinez, who rejects “French hegemony,” asks: “Why does the meal have to start with champagne? Where is it written?”
Martinez and other chefs have been the strongest voices for preserving Peru's increasingly threatened crop diversity, maintained by small farmers while intensive single-crop agricultural exports have flourished.
Peru has just renewed a 10-year ban on the cultivation of GMOs, a cornerstone of big American agriculture seen as a threat to Peru's traditional custodians of the country's diverse components, farmers who typically work on just one or two acres. Martinez's mentor, Gastón Acurio, supported the move.
Acurio, who is often credited with starting a culinary renaissance with the opening of his Lima restaurant Astrid y Gastón in 1994, was Peru's most popular chef until his protégé's meteoric rise. His extraordinary ability to bridge the cultural divide between Lima's elite and the rural underclass saw the 56-year-old briefly lead in the polls in the 2016 presidential race until he ruled himself out. (He has expressed no interest in running.)
However, the revival of Peruvian gastronomy faces obstacles. Fast food chains are growing here, and obesity rates, among the lowest in Latin America, are rising. “We are importing the North American model of holistic food,” warns Martinez. “It's the food that makes you sick.”
After Central won the rankings this year, there was an uproar over the $384 cost of its tasting menu in a country where the Food and Agriculture Organization says half the population is now food insecure.
Martinez says he employs about 100 people directly while paying above-market prices to — and cultivating stable, long-term relationships with — his often modest suppliers. Central also raised Peru's international profile and attracted tourists.
Although he avoids political posturing, his defense of indigenous knowledge is a deeply political act in a society where the security forces' massacre of anti-government demonstrators in December and January 2023 was motivated, as the OAS concluded, by “great stigma.” Against the demonstrators. Andes.
“I hope this restaurant gives meaning to the responsibility of serving fine cuisine in a country full of contradictions, where there is hunger, things are not working, and there is a lack of civic awareness,” Martinez says. “It's about what I can make of what I accept as a little bubble.”
