FOOD • October 2016
Peru: five of the best places to eat
Martin Morales, Peruvian chef and founder of Ceviche in London will be hosting our next After Hours Club event. He took time out from his preparations to share his five favourite Peruvian restaurants with The Club
The After Hours Club: ‘A Taste of Peru’ will take place on Tuesday 18 October 2016 at Ceviche Old Street, 2 Baldwin Street, London EC1V 9NU. Drinks from 6.30pm, dinner from 7pm. Event to finish at 10.30pm. £55 per person (plus £4 booking fee per ticket). Click here to book your place.
El Mercado, Lima
My favourite all-round restaurant in Peru is El Mercado in the Miraflores neighbourhood of Lima, run by a well-known chef called Rafael Osterling. It’s mainly just open at lunchtime, and serves incredible dishes made from great ingredients with no fuss. The room itself has a wonderful atmosphere and is very stylish.
Isolina, Lima
A recent discovery for me in Lima is a newish restaurant called Isolina (above). It serves the kind of home cooking that our grandmothers used to make, and is run by a great chef, Jose del Castillo. It’s in a beautiful old house in Barranco, a bohemian neighbourhood that I love and which influenced the design of Ceviche, my restaurant in Soho. It’s a very down-to-earth, well-priced establishment.
La Paisana, Lima
La Paisana is in the Magdalena del Mar neighbourhood of Lima. Chef Dona Sebastiana comes from a village in northern Peru called Catacaos, so the menu features very regional cuisine. She has the most powerful ceviches and the best tamales. She uses a northern Peruvian fish called the mero, which has a tough flesh that’s delicious and great for ceviches.
La Nueva Palomino, Arequipa
One of my favourite places in Peru is Arequipa, a beautiful Andean city that’s always sunny. It has an influential restaurant called La Nueva Palomino. It’s a family-run business that’s been going since the 1880s, and Monica Alpaca is the current mama who does the cooking. It takes Peruvian food back to its origins – everything is cooked by hand on log fires.
El Cantaro, Chiclayo
Chiclayo, in the north of Peru, is a real powerhouse of gastronomy. There’s a culinary school there that’s four storeys high with 800 students. Just outside Chiclayo, in a town called Lambayeque, is a legendary restaurant called El Cantaro, run by chef Dona Juanita Zunini. It has a big focus on cooking with duck – the traditional northern Peruvian duck and rice is incredible, very creamy, and made with coriander and beer.
This article has been tagged Food + Drink, Destination