Eating Lima
From Manhattan, With Love
When I first moved to New York, I refused to research restaurants. I didn’t want to rob myself of the experience of wandering around a neighborhood and peering down streets lined with potted perennials and into awning-shaded windows to get a sense of the vibe of a place, to scope out the relationship between waitstaff and diners, to scan the menu posted on the gate outside and imagine what I’d order. It was an indulgence in line with my most romantic sensibilities; it was how New Yorkers were meant to interact with their city. A little bit of faith, a little bit of hustle, and a genuine belief that the best of the world surrounded you and you just needed to look for it.
And it worked. Two quick case studies: first, after a grueling three-hour loop around the West Village one sticky July evening, searching for just the right mix of good wine list + unpretentious food + social atmosphere, Nozomi and I stumbled into Le Baratin, a French bistro on Greenwich where we began our meal with the best steak of our lives and ended it drinking free champagne and setting off flares with the bartenders; it was a perfect evening and I’ve returned several times since, including for my birthday. The second features Margaret, Bella, Michael, and I, hungry and hot in the Lower East Side, sidling up to hole-in-the-wall after hole-in-the-wall until we come across Gentleman Farmer, a tiny railroad-style space on Rivington with butter-caramel leather banquettes where we feast on semi-exotic meats (rabbit, bison, duck, lamb) and heft our generous pours of Merlot, cheersing to being young and employed and in New York City; another flawless, kissed-by-fate evening at a now-favorite spot.
This isn’t to say it was always foolproof; I’ve wandered into a few duds—an absolutely terrible Italian place in the East Village featuring gummy garlic bread that I went to over New Year’s with a group of college girlfriends comes immediately to mind—but I still remained righteously sure that my way of experiencing the culinary wonders of New York was the best, least pretentious, most adventurous way to go about it. I always gave recommendations that were unique, personal, and authentic.
But then a few things happened. I came across The Infatuation, a food website written with such panache (mostly the articles by my food critic idol, Chris Stang; the others are good but don’t make me actually smile into my laptop) that I simply had to start taking its advice about which new restaurants to patronize; I figured out that the sheer number and diversity of restaurants in New York could never be reasonably penetrated by my haphazard style of sampling them; and I realized that I was being kind of a righteous brat in many aspects of life and that my sense of superiority was keeping me from meaningful relationships, sensory enjoyment, and continued education. That last one is a lot to unpack, and I won’t do it here, but basically, I realized that I had a better chance of getting the most out of life if I leveraged the collective abilities and intelligence and different perspectives around me to do so and stopped stubbornly trying to do it all on my own.
I started reading a few food blogs, regularly pursuing Yelp reviews, and scanning Pulsd for new restaurant openings, along with my tried-and-true method of stalking into eateries at random and sampling their specials. And doing all that meant that I got to be part of a bigger conversation about food in New York—not one limited by my own experiences. And I loved it. I was so stupid to have held out on Momofuku so long just because it was already well-known. Imagine all the pork buns I could’ve eaten and didn’t. It honestly hurts me to think about.
So when Kav, my former boss, current friend, and potential future boss—who knows?—told me she was going to visit me in Lima over Easter, it was quite clear that our itinerary needed to consist of one thing and one thing only, and I was more than comfortable with its popularity: eat at the three Lima restaurants that food critics the world over voted onto the list of 50 best restaurants in the world.
Lima’s three are Central (#5), Maido (#8), and Astrid y Gastón (#33). It’s the only city in South America to have multiple restaurants on the list (and one of only a few in the world—bested only by New York and Paris, each with four, and neither of which has two in the top ten). I ate at all three (Kav joined me for two), broadening my palate and learning a great deal about food, hospitality, and Lima’s unique relationship with the culinary world as I went. Let’s dig in.
Let’s Go Back Before We Go Forward
Why Lima? What about this hot, dry capital makes it such a mecca for culinary machinations? My three-part hypothesis is informed by conversations with chefs, servers, historians, and us regular folk both in and out of Peru, and I haven’t checked to see if any other food writers (burgeoning or not) agree with me, in part because it’s a hard thing to attribute exactly and in part because I’m now writing this from the Galápagos (more on my exodus from Peru later) where the wifi only works every few hours.
First: Peru has a long history of imperialism and empire-building; empires, with their systems of labor and servitude, create the divisions between classes and an excess of time and resources that would allow for the development of a cuisine. Archeological evidence suggests that different cultures have flourished in the fertile river basins and coasts of Peru for centuries; the most famous is, of course, the Incas, who rose to their greatest power in the early 16th century. As the Incas conquered tribes, they pressed their new citizens to provide the emperor with tribute and taxes, often in the form of labor and crops. This meant not only that royal Incas had a much richer diet than anyone in Peru had had before (one of the hypotheses for the higher-than-average doorways at Machu Picchu is that noble Incas were much taller than most indigenous people, as their balanced diet stymied the malnutrition that can result from eating mostly potatoes), but also that they had plenty of free time to explore non-necessary-for-life pursuits, including art and culinary expression, as they didn’t need to labor in the fields for sustenance. The same thing happened again a century later, when the Spaniards invaded Peru, sending their military to conquer the Incas and then many Spanish citizens to settle the region. While Spain colonized much of South America, the Spanish crown’s focus on Peru was unrivaled; the gold and silver in Peru was far more desirable than the fertile lands and lesser minerals of Chile and Argentina, so Peru got an upsized share of Spanish emissaries trying to strike it rich. These noble Spanish families brought their households with them, including their cooks, who introduced European dishes to the region and furthered the culture of culinary appreciation.
Second: Peru’s population, and Lima’s particularly, is especially diverse for the region; their native tribes survived the Spanish’s arrival and conquest in far greater numbers than other countries in Latin America, and the Spanish conquistadors brought the first Africans over as slaves in the 16th century1. Both groups became forced laborers in Peru’s gold and silver mines, and Lima became an important port in the Latin American slave trade of both Africans and indigenous people. Nowadays, almost half of Peruvians identify as Amerindian; over a third as mestizo, or mixed; blacks, Japanese, Chinese, Amazonians, and Aymaras make up about 8%, and about 12% identify as white.2 Peru has the largest population of Chinese people in Latin America and the second-largest (after Brazil) of Japanese people; both groups were brought to the country in the early-19th century as farm and railroad laborers (and their number went up after 1845, when Peru abolished slavery). So now, you have all of these different groups with different culinary traditions mixing in a way that’s especially unique, leading to dozens of different types of fusion cuisine (most famously, chifa—Chinese-Peruvian fusion).
Third: Lima is the largest port of a country with an extremely varied climate and topography that jumps from desert to jungle to mountain to ocean coast; Peru’s agricultural and animal riches are resplendent and provide the raw base from which to create the strongest possible food culture. Peru grows almost all its own food (and exports a great deal of it to the world), including over 3,000 different types of potato, and Lima’s position on the coast means it gets the best mariscos on offer.
Whichever theory you choose, some combination of natural abundance mixed with creative people has led to Lima’s food scene developing unrivaled in Latin America, and those of us with mouths are all the better for it.
A Diversity of Dining
I would’ve been doing a disservice to Lima and to you all were I to only eat at the world-ranked eateries mentioned above; I filled out my time in Lima at casual cervicherias, chifas, sandwich stands (where I ate the classic chicharrón: pork, spicy mayo, and sweet potato—delicious), cafes, and kitchens (where my homestay mother taught me to make causa, a traditional Peruvian dish of layered mashed potatoes, tuna, avocado, and vegetables—slightly less delicious). I left unimpressed with Lima’s take on Chinese food (my shrimp dumplings were disappointingly dry) and underwhelmed by Peruvian ceviche (it’s kind of slimy and basically only has the one flavor note of tart—what’s to love?), but deeply appreciative of the diversity on offer, which far surpassed anything I’d seen so far in South America, even in other capitals like Santiago or Buenos Aires.
I still missed good service, though. The idea of adding to the dining experience with perceptive, meticulous service hasn’t taken hold here; even at Maido, eighth-best restaurant in the world, I had to flag my server twice to ask for the check. (He agreed to bring it the first time but then forgot.) When I get back to New York and have my water refilled without asking and my waiter materialize exactly when I’ve chosen my wine and my check brought and tastefully laid down on my table within 90 seconds of me resting my fork tine-side-down on my plate, I will 1) weep for joy 2) tip fifty percent.
Were I to break down my scorecard for a perfect meal, it would be: 60% taste (with pleasure trumping novelty), 10% presentation (everything from plating to dining room decor), 10% service, and 10% story (of the food, of the chef, of the locale—I’m a sucker for a beautiful origin story).
Astrid y Gastón, the least of the best according to other critics (#33), scored by far the highest on my rubric; Central (#5) came in at a distant second and Maido (#8) at a still more distant third.
Astrid y Gastón: Yes y Yes
Kav and I walked into Astrid y Gastón on at 2 p.m. on Easter Sunday, having fasted all morning in preparation (we’d saked our thirst with coffee and an Inca Kola, a sickly-sweet highlighter-yellow soft drink beloved by all Peruvians that is reminiscent of flat Mountain Dew mixed with battery acid). We were immediately seated at a gorgeous oak table in a grey-blue room that featured plants growing upside down from the windowed roof; we speculated as to how they were watered and pruned and how dirt didn’t fall on the tables while we read over the tasting menu in anticipation.
Eating with someone you love is wonderful. I hadn’t done it in many months. I’d been eating by myself, or with beloved books, or with wonderful new friends, but there’s something so comfortable about knowing whether the other person will let you try her drink or not having to make small talk about family history when you’re trying to absorb the menu. I also hadn’t realized how much I’d deeply missed Kav—her laugh, her wit, her ability to take me to task for absolutely anything and everything (9 out of 10 times, fully deserved). Sitting down to this experience with her was one of my favorite moments of the last four months.
We began the meal in bed. Three little bites were brought to us on a scaled representation of a queen-sized bed with rumpled sheets; it was Astrid y Gastón’s way of inviting us into their intimacy and celebrating forbidden love. (They’re a formerly married couple who are now not-so-secretly separated, but they keep up appearances and co-run the restaurant—and they slyly acknowledge the juicy underbelly of the love triangle that’s at the heart of their marriage in their dishes.)
Then we moved to the water: an ice-cold pearl-shaped dish laden with seaweed and a perfect purple seashell arrived, representing the Pacific and its wave of culture and abundance. It bore a baby bay scallop, microgreens, flowers, and an avocado mayo, all of which was then doused in frozen-nitrogen-magicked green apple snow.
Next: our first ceviche! And my first opportunity to pretend to like it more than I did in order to not greatly offend our server by spitting out his national dish. Astrid y Gastón’s was the best I tried, and I appreciated their poetic flair of calling it “ceviche of all bloods from the city that carries it in its heart,” but I just don’t love raw fish and spicy sauce and corn.
Our last starter brought the themes of the first three together in a complicated blend of sweet and spicy that somehow hung together: hibiscus jelly, scallops, chili mayo, popped corn, diced pepper and onion, edible flowers. Weird but it worked.
Kav and I, being carb-obsessed, had had a minor panic attack when we realized that we didn’t start our meal with the same badass-looking bread basket that we saw on the tables around us, and had asked our waiter to bring us some. He came down hard on us with a reprimand about filling up with bread and ensured us that he hadn’t forgotten, that it would come in due time, and that we should stop asking stupid questions (that last thing was more unspoken than not, and was way less irritating than it looks like in print—his particular brand of machismo mansplaining was actually kind of likable).
So when a cornucopia of colorful carbohydrates was placed on our table after the first four dishes, alongside a red slab of granite bearing three types of butter, we were surprised and pleased and very careful to only nibble at it.
It was hard to restrain ourselves, particularly from the thick slice of purple-corn-and-goldenberry bread that was quite honestly the best thing I’ve ever eaten (I asked for two more slices to take home with us at the end of the meal and we ate them for breakfast the next morning, plain, in bed, giving thanks to Allah for bakers). Each bread utilized different ingredients—we had a cornbread studded with peppers, a potato roll light and airy, a dense coca bread that neither Kav nor I particularly enjoyed.
But we had to hold back, because our server was right: the food didn’t stop. (This meal was both the best I’ve ever had and also made me sicker / more disgustingly full than I’ve ever been.) He brought out the next course, a Peruvian/Cantonese mashup: black corn tortilla Peking cuy (guinea pig) tacos, which were delicious and just small enough that you could have your first and last bite of guinea pig at the same time.
We stuck with the theme of hand-held meat and moved onto what might have been my favorite dish of the day (my refined palate makes itself known here, latching onto fried corn and pork): an ode to a free Venezuela, a suckling pig and winterfruit arepa drenched in opaca sauce (a delicious blend of oil, pepper, and a South American herb called huacatay that tastes like a mix between basil and mint).
A&G’s nod to nikkei (Peru-Japanese harmony) came next, in the form of a dumpling version of the Peruvian dish sancochado, a soup of beef, potatoes, and vegetables. Dumplings are like the pizza of Asian food—even when they’re poorly made, they’re still good—and these were far from poorly made.
I like to think that a good tasting menu basically follows German playwright Freytag’s dramatic structure: the first few courses are the exposition, introducing us to the voice of the chef and the main ingredients we’ll be spending time with; then comes our rising action, the first mains, important, bold musings on themes of the meal; next is our climax—the dish most emblematic of the message the chef wants to tell—which gives way to falling action, the tail end of main dishes, usually more comfortable and less avant-garde than the first few but still touching on and wrapping up our important themes; we end, in denouement, with dessert, which sends us off gently with beautiful final notes of the story of the meal, often sweet, sometimes with a bitter or tart surprise.
Dish nine was our climax after exciting pops of rising action: a beautiful, simple, deeply meaningful traditional Peruvian chupe, a soup of potatoes and mariscos, with a “shy egg”—a poached egg hiding under a wafer of bread, meant to represent the new life that comes as a result of the mixing of the traditional and the new in Lima.
Next we had a simple, salty-sweet scallops-and-lúcuma (a juicy, pulpy fruit) dish, meant to represent the biodiversity found both in the sea and in the jungle, that didn’t quite live up to its poetic intensions (the textures left something to be desired).
Eleven was another favorite, an elevated fish taco (complete with little tortillas to re-plate the delicious fish ourselves) that stood for a united, borderless Latin America, sharing culture and crops along its length. The flavors included the mole of Mexico in the north and the kick of Argentinian asado from the south and it was fabulous.
Another Lima-dipping-its-toe-into-other-cultures ode: curried rabbit with jasmine quinoa. Rich, nutty, with a rich sauce and plentiful, but not overpowering, texture changes.
Finally, our last main: short rib stew and chaufa rice (a close cousin of fried rice), served with steamed greens above a slash of squash. Heavy, what you wish your home cooking tasted like, and a perfect decisive nod to the theme of cultural inspiration coming from all corners of the world.
At this point, Kav and I were throughly convinced we would throw up before making it through dessert, even though we hadn’t touched the bread basket in hours (did I mention that this lunch took us four hours and that we were the last guests in the entire restaurant by the time we finally staggered out the door?). We drank water, stirred the cocktails we were steadfastly not drinking, in a feeble attempt to save room for the three courses that remained, and pepped each other up: “You can make it,” “Jesus died so that we could live, and what is living if not relishing every second of this meal?” et cetera.
Our first dessert, our falling action of clean flavors: A&G’s Amazon-inspired version of masato, a fizzy drink that Amazonian tribes make by leaving a mixture of tubers and fruit to ferment. A&G’s made theirs into a cassava sorbet and served it with a coconut cream, plantain and bacon crumble, and a syrupy chili sauce. It sounds like way too much but let me tell you, it was incredibly well done, refreshing and sweet and spicy and sour all at the same time. Kav can attest that I licked my bowl clean.
My least favorite dessert came next, but it was so beautiful I still savored it: a nod to Astrid’s Trijuilana grandmother, a sweet humita, or traditional steamed corn cake, served with an orange blossom sorbet on top of freeze-dried sweet corn and freshly doused with hot lavender honey. The whole thing came out in a little ceramic corn dish we slowly lifted the top off of, releasing the hot steam (from the humita) and the cold steam (from the freeze-dried deliciousness at the bottom) into our faces. Beautiful. But it was still, in the end, kind of soggy cornbread, which I’ve couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to finish.
Last dessert, perfect dessert, ideal denouement: a paper-thin carrot pastry stuffed with chocolate creme and dusted in Tumbes cacao nibs, served on a specially-made platter featuring busts of Astrid y Gastón themselves, along with one of their many specialized Quechua farmers, Gastón’s lover (I told you their marriage was a very thinly veiled ruse!), a Lima man who eats at least three times a week at the restaurant (after hearing that, I seriously considered moving to Lima and becoming a regular at A&G myself, in hopes of one day being immortalized in a dessert plate), and a few generic figures to represent their guests.
Oh wait! You thought we were done? We did too, actually; I’d dusted the cacao off of my fingers, savored the lingering bittersweet taste, and leaned back in my chair in an attempt to find the most comfortable position to begin the digestion process. Sitting there, the picture of grace, I had a perfect view of our server gliding over to our table with a large wooden box in his hands.
He sat the box down and began flipping hidden latches, popping out drawers and side compartments, each with rows of delicacies nestled within: homemade lime-goldenberry marshmallows, mini pineapple cakes, Andean mint truffles, purple corn jellies, seven different intensities of dark chocolate truffles, fruit meringues in chocolate baths, their version of Pop Rocks—puffed quinoa immobilized in a smooth milk chocolate that really did pop in your mouth. Astrid is a famous pastry chef and her final gift to her guests was this magic box replete with treasures. We were allowed to choose as many as we wanted, and I felt like Edmund Pevensie must’ve, faced with a tray of perpetually regenerating Turkish Delight. Kav and I settled on five each and managed to nibble most of them before begging for a box (and for the previously mentioned extra bread).
The meal topped out my restaurant scale, and will now be the thing I compare every great dining experience to. It had everything: delicious food (comes in at a 9.5/10, half a point off for a few questionable texture moments but otherwise flawless), gorgeous presentation (10/10—maybe even 11/10 for the fact that whenever patrons were dining alone, a beautiful bonsai tree draped in ribbons was placed across from them to give them company), attentive and thoughtful service (especially for South America) (9/10), and a beautiful story of love—love of food, of community, of diversity, of aesthetic appreciation (10/10).
Onto the Next: Central
The next day, still slightly uncomfortably full from four hours of plates of rich, gorgeous food, Kav and I made our way across town to Central, #5 restaurant in the world, to see if we could somehow maybe weasel our way into it.
We’d been on the waitlist for lunch or dinner for all of the days that Kav was in town, but nothing had opened up. Justifiable, considering the long list of diners clamoring for a spot at Virgilio Martinez and Pia Leon’s understated tables.
The husband-and-wife pair (as far as I know, this one without a famous affair attached) have run Central together since 2008, and have now become famous champions of Peruvian cuisine, focusing on bringing the bevy of little-known Peruvian flavors and ingredients to the rest of the world. Martinez trained at Astrid y Gastón and has taken his tasting menu in a different direction than theirs: while A&G focused on the story, supplementing their thesis with delicious food, Martinez places the food itself as his only plot line. The menu is called an Ecosystem, and each dish is listed with the elevation of the ingredients that make it up; the simple story of immense biodiversity, combined with the dark decor and earthy atmosphere of the restaurant and its bar, make you feel as if you’ve fallen through a map and into the land itself—into the ocean floor, into the muggy Amazon, into the Andes.
Kav and I settled into our spots at the bar, having snuck our way into 10-course tasting menu lunch with genuine smiles and a genuine plea that it was Kav’s last day in Lima and she’d been dying to eat at Central. We ordered drinks (yes, it was just past noon, and yes, we were already preemptively stuffed and were looking at another four hours of eating, but we were sitting at the bar and the bottles were winking at us and we couldn’t not) and got prepped for our first course.
Rock Mollusks, -10m, came out as three different plates, one and a half of which was edible: an earthen dish of dried sponges (not edible) on which rested a bright green paper-thin cracker (edible), a tiny potted seaweed holding two pieces of wood carved into a tongue-depressor shape but with a much more comfortable heft (not edible), and a stone bowl of mollusks and snails covered in shaved seaweed (edible, and smooth, and delicious).
We jumped altitude fast, up to Mil Moray at 3,500m, which was also presented in a group of three: a dried and tied alpaca heart (to look at, not to eat), a wooden tray filled with rock-sized pieces of salt on top of which rested two small roasted potatoes (to eat), and a granite bowl filled with a dip of tomatoes, muña mint, and shaved alpaca meat (to eat). A little creepy, a little otherworldy, very thick and relatively delicious, though in an overpowering way that made me want to stop after two bites.
A 100m drop took us to Thick Stems, a beautiful medusa of red onions lightly battered and fried that broke off in your mouth like savory cotton candy, served with crackers of poached and sliced Andean tubers (olluco) on a bed of mustard and chincho, an Andean herb that is supposed to taste like basil (I couldn’t taste it).
My favorite dish, if for shock value of the presentation alone: Waters of Many, 450m, also known as piranha two ways (three, if you count the frozen ones in the bowl only there to support the strip of dried piranha skin that we were actually meant to eat). Little wrapped piranha patties, coated in the sweet juice of the cocona, accompanied it; biting into them felt like eating a meaty cotton pad soaked in a piña colada and then left to get crusty. I couldn’t recommend it for the taste, but what an experience nevertheless. Definitely the climax of the menu.
Bread time! Lima-cuisine-cultured as we were, Kav and I knew not to ask for it beforehand this time around, but rather to wait and bide our time. Here it came, dish five, High Jungle at 1900m, exactly halfway through: a warm puff of coca bread served on a bed of steaming coca leaves, another air-light potato cracker, and a cakey slice of cassava bread, thick and sweet. None of it was good as the worst bread at A&G’s, but it was all served beautifully; I appreciated it with my eyes and let my stomach rest. Which, incidentally, is basically the short version of why I don’t think Central’s dining experience was as wonderful as Astrid y Gastón’s: at A&G’s, there was nothing I didn’t want to eat, even at the cost of possibly irreparable damage to my digestive system. At Central, I easily said no. I need my indulgent tasting menus to bring out the gourmand in me, not just the appreciative menu-reader.
We dropped again, back to the ocean: Marine Soil at 0m. A beautiful plate of sea urchin, pepino melon, razor clam, and seaweed. That’s it: four simple ingredients, all the same color palate except for the pop of burnt orange uni, coming together to become the exact taste of the ocean incarnate, soft and wet and salty and smooth and strong. Kav loved this dish; I’ve never seen someone swoon so throughly into a spoon before.
At this point in the meal, I only needed a bit of my brainpower to follow the story that Martinez and Leon were telling; the diversity of Peru is amazing, its ingredients are beautiful and simple, we must respect and appreciate the earth and those who care for it and the many treasures it provides. Okay. Got it. I flagged down our bartender and ordered another cocktail.
Land of Corn, 2010m came next; my Midwestern heart fluttered as I took in the presentation—a cob of kculli (apparently the official name for the purple corn I’d been calling just that) on its own, aside a dish of glistening tortilla chips of kculli and chulpi (a small white corn) and little corn dumplings hiding in a gummy purple sauce. It looked like the Northwestern dining hall’s misguided attempt at Cinco de Mayo, and it tasted like Corn Pops and a bag of Tostino’s mated and then were marinated in corn syrup. That is to say, it was mostly delicious but slightly disgusting.
A true favorite came next, Sea Coral, again at -10m; this is the first time we’ve repeated an elevation from before—this is our falling action, hitting the same notes on the way down—and I’d happy live here forever if it meant I got to eat this on the regular. Octopus, crab, squid, all bathed in a soft green foam. The octopus was perfect: seared to a beautiful finish, seasoned lightly, texture and taste lining up in three flawless bites.
Our final main hits as close to home cooking as Central will get: High Andes Mountains, 4100m, pork belly and mashwa, another Andean tuber, coated in thick, sweet kañiwa, also known as baby quinoa, and sprinkled with edible Andean flowers. Can’t say I loved the taste—too heavy, too sweet.
Dessert leaves us right back in the middle, at 2750m, the Lower Andes, and takes the form of a soft scoop of grainy, bitter dark chocolate ganache on top of a bed of minty ice, sprinkled with freeze-dried clay and powdered muña (mint) and little balls of cushuro, a type of algae that only grows in the high lakes of the Andes and that burst in your mouth like boba. Taken together, a bite of Lower Andes had the myriad textures and scents of a garden after it rains: wet, rich, granular, thick, fresh, clean. Not my favorite, as far as my sweet tooth is concerned, but a beautiful last note, lasting and memorable.
In the end, that’s what Central felt like to me—memorable for its standout ingredient use and extreme presentation (the frozen piranhas though!), not for the actual experience of eating the food. It was still incredible, and I of course recommend you go the next time you’re passing through Lima, but it didn’t make me fall in love over the course of a meal, not with the chefs, not with their story, and not with what they served me, and it’s gotta be docked a bit for that. Food, 8/10, presentation, 9/10, service, 8/10 (perhaps unfair to judge as we were seated at the bar and had a few different waiters over the course of our ten courses), and story, 6/10.
Maido Falls Flat
Four days later, after saying goodbye to Kav and spending a few days walking around Lima, eating simple breakfasts of bread and eggs at my homestay, and skipping lunch to let my stomach un-distend itself, I decided to see if I could have as much luck walking into the eighth best restaurant in the world as I did with the fifth.
I did, and sat down at the sushi counter, in front of a glass case of octopus tentacles, musky purple with the almost obscene dusty pink of their tiny suction cups, lined up in a row like the holes on a flute.
I won’t tell you about every dish at Maido, which is perhaps the strongest review I could give; its story is simple—Japanese food with Peruvian ingredients—and I simply didn’t like the dishes enough, even aesthetically, to want to relive them all. There was a point, in fact, a bite into the fifth dish, which was already the second bowl of ceviche, where I considered leaving the meal even if they made me pay for the 8/13 of it I couldn’t get through.
I powered through, though, and just started leaving plenty of food on my plate for the dishes I didn’t love, which made my mostly absentee waiter raise his oversized eyebrows on the few occasions that he arrived in time to take my dish away before I nodded at one of his brethren to come clear it. I passed the time waiting for my next dish by watching the sushi chefs in front of me slice up fish, plate platters of sashimi, and drizzle teriyaki over beef, and chatting in Spanish to the Barcelona-born accountant-turned-chef who was sitting next to me, taking notes on her phone on the cuts of fish to bring back to the pescatarian restaurant she cooks at in Spain.
Some lovely highlights: nigiri from the sea, two gorgeous pieces of fish on top of perfect rice, one topped with a quivering quail egg; and nigiri from the earth, served two courses later, wagyu beef and another quail egg with a strip of beef tongue as its partner. Buttery, rich miso-marinated cod, covered in crisply sliced Bahuaja nuts and served aside dollops of apple gel. A fabulous dessert of tofu cheesecake ice cream, sweet potato crumble, grape and taperiba (kind of like a mango) tapioca, soy milk foam.
In total: food, 6/10; presentation, 8/10; service, 6.5/10; and story, 4/10.
Maybe if I liked sushi more, maybe if I hadn’t had two wonderful tasting menu experiences less then a week ago, maybe if I hadn’t been eating on a weekday afternoon amid expat businessmen clad in expensive suits and clamoring for more sake cocktails, I would’ve enjoyed Maido much more than I did. As it stands, I was sad to part with $160 in exchange for the meal; I walked home, less physically full and lesser still aesthetically satisfied than I was after either A&G or Central, lamenting over what other, better meals I could’ve spent the money on.
En Fin
I’ve never eaten so well in such a short period of time as I did in Lima. I gave it completely to my sense of taste, following the restaurant world’s recommendations as well as running around to chifas for dumplings, to Chorrillos for ceviche, to the nicest mall in South America for pineapple-basil popsicles, to Barranco for double chocolate gelato, to a bakery tucked into a residential street in Miraflores for crusty focaccia and dripping burrata in a bed of sun-dried tomatoes slick with oil. It was fantastic, and budget-busting, and completely worth it. I’m walking (rolling, staggering; insert joke about being constantly too full to move here) away from Lima with a deep appreciation of Peru’s cultural, geographic, and biologic diversity, and of the magical creators who’ve decided to call a kitchen in Lima home. I’ve confirmed my passion for eating the literal and figurative fruits of others’ labors and discovered how deeply I love following the story behind them.
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