Virgilio Martinez’s Central is leading Peru’s culinary revolution

• Sharon Verghis

  @SVerghis

  
• 12:00AM June 9, 2015

But behind the blank front door that guards the sleek dining room of Central, Latin America’s top-rated restaurant (which has just rocketed to No 4 in the S. Pellegrino list of the world’s 50 best restaurants) there’s a churchlike hush. Diners, some of whom have waited six months for a reservation, sit expectantly with all eyes gravitating towards celebrity chef and restaurant owner ­Virgilio Martinez.

The lean, whippety figure is all business as he scurries from one end of the futuristic steel and glass kitchen “lab” to the other.

With a quick, bracing sip of my pisco sour — Peru’s ubiquitous national drink, a heady mix of grape brandy, key lime juice, cane sugar syrup, egg whites and angostura bitters — I await the first dish in Martinez’s internationally celebrated 17-course Mater Elevations tasting menu, containing native ingredients harvested from various altitudes across the Andes, Amazon and the Peruvian coast, from a depth of 25m below sea level to heights up to 4200m, foraged by Martinez and his team.

Grandly dubbed Paita Expedition, a bizarre concoction of frogfish and deepwater algae arrives at my table as two bright green studded wafers balanced precariously on a foamy green rock and a stone slab. I don’t know whether to eat, genuflect or applaud the sheer artistry. Finally, I dig in. It’s … interesting, a salty burst of foam.

There’s a visual pattern to the 16 dishes that follow. Martinez’s food aesthetic, it seems, centres on the sculptural, architectural and organic, with a preponderance of bark, rocks, pebbles and twigs offsetting delicate botanical and ­marine coral shapes and quirky molecular touches.

Some dishes are gloriously pretty: dish No 2, Orchard of Mala, consists of two delicate cups of ­cactus milk decorated with cartoonishly bright retama petals. Others range from the surreal (dish No 8, Rock of the Sea, a giant foamy ball containing lemony clams) to plain bizarre (dish No 12, Extreme Altitude, comprising frozen potatoes and cushuro, gelatinous beads of algae from high-altitude lakes) to the coldly austere (dish No 3, Dry Andes, featuring “chaco clay and ocas”).

The last is a visual trick; I try to eat the fingerling potatoes only to be told by a discreet hovering waitress that they are “decoration only”. The two homely chalk-covered stones I’ve ignored are ­instead the main dish (though I can’t say they’re particularly edible ­either).

Martinez enjoys confounding the eye, tongue and the tastebuds: over dishes such as Dead Amazon, The Ten-mile Fish, Octopus in the Desert and Valley Between the Andes, I sample all manner of exotic native plants, grains, fruits and herbs — macambo, sachapapa, huampo, kiwicha, airampo, coca leaf, mamey — accompanying everything from duck and calamari to scallops and shredded beef heart (the last tastes like a meaty foam).

Later, Martinez — nimble and movie-star handsome — pays a visit to my table to explain the food philosophy at Central, his flagship restaurant. Everything has to be native to Peru, he says, and reflect the country’s geographical riches from coastal Lima to the Andes and Amazon: “We are blessed in Peru to have such an incredible biodiversity.” He sees his creations as a mix of science and art: he takes a highly experimental ­approach to crafting new dishes, working with leaders in different disciplines (“geographers, anthropologists”) and travelling regularly across Peru in search of new ingredients to work with alongside his 20-strong team in the food lab that is the restaurant’s vast kitchen.

But they can’t just exist as concepts: “They have to taste good, too,” he says earnestly. His goal? To bring an authentically “100 per cent” ­indigenous Peruvian cuisine to the world, free of any other imported culinary traditions.

Martinez, 37, is the face of a food revolution that has elevated Peruvian cuisine to unprecedented international heights in recent years. The world first sat up in 2011 when Catalan uber-chef Ferran Adria announced the country held the key to the future of gastronomy: Peru’s gastronomic boom is a sociocultural phenomenon “unique in the world”, he said. Fellow superchef Alain Ducasse joined in the praise, declaring “Peru will become one of the leading actors on the global culinary scene”, while the Culinary Institute of America named 2014 the year of Peruvian cuisine.

Martinez, whose Michelin-starred London restaurant Lima draws rave reviews, is one of the younger rising stars of a generation of Peruvian celebrity chefs such as veteran Gaston Acurio (whose portfolio of restaurants ­includes the top-rated Astrid y Gaston in Lima), Pedro Miguel Schiaffino, Javier Wong and ­Rafael Osterling. Acurio is seen as the man responsible for the globalisation of Peruvian cuisine, one of the fathers of a culinary revolution that began as Peru unshackled itself from decades of economic and political travails in the 1990s, turning to its rich food culture to express a renewed sense of national growth, identity and pride.

The rise and rise of its cuisine stems from Peru’s rich geographical diversity (Acurio has said “we have more than 2000 varieties of potatoes and 200 kinds of aji chillies”) and complex cultural heritage, with Peru’s food culture reflecting the country’s many immigration waves since the Spanish conquest. Influences range from the African, indigenous and Spanish (the fusion is known as criolla) to French and Italian, as well as Chinese and Japanese (the latter two cultures have spawned Peru’s rich Chifa and Nikkei culinary traditions).

This culinary melting pot has resulted in dishes as diverse as ceviche, Peru’s national dish (raw fish marinated in citrus juice, often served with a leftover citrus marinade known as leche de tigre, or tiger’s milk) to anticuchos (marinated beef heart skewers) to lomo saltado (Chinese-style beef ­tenderloin strips and tomatoes seasoned in soy sauce).

Martinez and his peers have tapped into this rich cultural heritage, drawing from the bounties of the Andes (think trout, alpaca, cuy, or guinea pig, Andean grains like kiwicha and choclo), the Amazon (freshwater fish like the giant ­paiche), and coastal Lima’s abundant seafood — sea bass and flounder, black scallop and chita fish (Peruvian grunt fish), a gift of the icy Humboldt Current.

The world has finally taken ­notice — as have the locals, who, Martinez says, were largely unaware of the sheer breadth of this rich cuisine at their doorstep. “I love this place,” he says. “We are doing our own thing and we care about and defend what we do.”

Sharon Verghis was a guest of PromPeru, the Peru Export and Tourism Promotion Board.

Sharon Verghis

@SVerghis