How Peruvian Food Became A Global Star

Julia Moskin speaks to chefs and fans about the growing international profile of Peruvian cuisine.

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 1500 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 Gaston 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 – Gastón reminisced about his early days as a chef, introducing ceviche to wide-eyed foreign diners.

Gaston now has 70 restaurants, including nine locations of his cebicheria 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 Martinez, Pia Leon, Mitsuhara Tsumura, Jorge Munoz 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.

Gaston’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% said they would vote for Gaston 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,” 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 tricolour 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 Calderon 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 aji 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 Adria.

Erik opened the cheerful, inventive Llama Inn in New York’s Brooklyn borough, 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.

Erik was raised by Peruvian-immigrant parents near the large Peruvian community in Paterson, New Jersey. But during three years as a sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park in New York, he said, it never occurred to him that the food he grew up with would become the basis of his professional success.

He 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.”

Humberto 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, Humberto had time to fulfil a long-held family dream: to give his mother a chance to re-create 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 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% 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 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 jalapeno, 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.

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 Gaston, whose father was a senator, were watching the food revolution taking place around the world. Gaston 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 Rene 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 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, Sao Paulo and other Latin American cities have also risen in the rankings, making the entire region increasingly appealing and accessible to gastrotourists.

Valerie 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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Julia Moskin

©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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