Peruvians queue for no one. Queuing is for patsies, pushovers, foreigners who don’t know any better. In Lima, the brash, chaotic capital, shoppers form scrums in front of hard-eyed assistants, drivers invent lanes between techni-coloured minivans stuffed with commuters, surfers steal waves like baseball players sneaking third, and the wealthy opt out entirely, sending maids in their stead or greasing a few palms.
It was odd, then, last September, to see a queue of World Cup proportions gather on the outskirts of Miraflores, a wealthy suburb of Lima. For three days, the line snaked its way around a convention centre, where the country’s first international gastronomic fair was taking place. Limeños paid 20 soles for tickets, the cost of several three-course meals in a local restaurant, and the mood in line was one of delight. “How delicious,” said Luis Diaz, rubbing his paunch in glee at the thought of a full day’s eating. Diaz and his friends Lourdes Ospina and Diego Carrera were unfazed by their two-hour wait, whiling away the time with food fantasies. “Ceviche, mmm, my favourite, duck with rice, prawn chowder,” he said, ticking off his mental wish list. “I heard there is lucuma [a jungle fruit with flesh the texture of hard-boiled egg yolk] ice cream,” Ospina enthused. “And picarones [doughnut-shaped pumpkin fritters with spiced molasses]”.
Nor was their enthusiasm dampened by their being unable to afford $200 seminars with chefs such as Albert Adrià from Catalonia’s legendary El Bulli restaurant, or Manuel Tejedor of Galicia’s Casa Marcelo. To them, as to many in the crowd, the real star of this show was homegrown: Gastón Acurio, the mop-haired messiah of Peruvian cuisine. The owner of more than 20 restaurants in Peru and abroad, author of more than a dozen cookbooks and host of a popular cable television show, 41-year-old Acurio is a household name in this nation of 28 million. And he’s also the seemingly unstoppable force behind the growing popularity of Peruvian food around the world. If ceviche doesn’t become the next sushi – going from exotic to popular to ubiquitous in the space of a few decades – it won’t be for lack of trying on his part.
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Acurio’s zeal for Peru’s rich gastronomic legacy has not only fuelled a rapid expansion in his business interests, with brands worth an estimated $60m this year. It has also provided a catalyst for the nation’s recovering sense of national pride. While Peru’s football team is languishing at 88th in world cup rankings, its cuisine is starting to get noticed – in many ways thanks to Acurio.
At the fair, he evoked Maradona-like devotion. “Gastón! Gastón!” throngs of middle-aged women cried out, throwing their arms up and wriggling in delight, like schoolgirls at an early Beatles concert. “Over here! Por favoor,” beseeched a group of families. “Por favoor, a photo!” Waving genially, the chef chatted and posed for photographs with fans for almost an hour before attempting an exit through a side door. Swarms of admirers followed him, like iron filings to a magnet.
Tacus, Papas, Piscos – finding your way round a Peruvian platter
Aji – bright yellow Peruvian chilli. According to Mariella Balbi, a Lima-based food writer, a combination of aji, its ubiquitous red relation rocoto, garlic and onions, creates the “alchemy” at the core of Peruvian cuisine.
Aji de Gallina – a mild, chilli and nut chicken stew.
Anticuchos – grilled skewers of cow heart marinated in chilli, cumin, oregano vinegar and oil. A popular street food that has found its way on to many restaurant menus.
Chicharron – deep-fried pork, often served in a bread roll with a spicy red-onion-and-chilli salsa and a slice of fried sweet potato. The dish is a legacy of Peru’s African slaves, who cooked with the cheapest cuts of meat. Fish, mixed seafood and chicken are also served chicharron-style.
Chupe de Camarones – a spectacular prawn chowder served with potato, corn and whole prawns.
Papa Huancaina – a sauce of white cheese and yellow pepper served over boiled, thick-sliced yellow potato.
Peruvian lime – more yellow and lumpy than the limes we see at supermarkets, but more fragrant and flavourful, too. These limes are an essential component of Peru’s national drink, the pisco sour.
Pisco – a clear grape brandy that has been made since the 16th century in the Ica valley, not far from the port of Pisco. It comes in four varieties: “pure”, from Quebranta grapes, “aromatic”, from grapes derived from the family of muscatels, “green must”, from the distillation of grape musts in fermentation process; and “acholado”, from a blend of varieties.
Suspiro de Limeno – a sickly sweet dessert of lime curd and meringue, typical in the capital.
Tacu tacu – fried rice and beans served with meat or seafood and a fried egg.
The sense of optimism that surrounds Acurio is unusual in a society that is still, in some ways, recovering from the trauma of the 1980s and early 1990s, when a bloody conflict between the government and the Maoist Shining Path group claimed 70,000 lives and hyperinflation made everyday life a struggle. Today, although the remnants of Shining Path are often branded narco-traffickers driven more by dollars than any ideology, the gap between the country’s rich and poor – the gap that fuelled the leftist insurgencies – remains. Three out of 10 Peruvians live in poverty (a figure that rises to seven in 10 in the high Andes, where subsistence farmers eke out a living from potato crops) and social conflicts are on the rise – often over the country’s vast store of mineral resources. (Peru is the world’s leading producer of silver, and among the top-five producers of gold, zinc and copper.)
The mid- to late-1990s saw an economic recovery that has led to record rates of growth, a flood of foreign investment and some diversification of the economy into agribusinesses such as asparagus and artichokes. New laws have begun to address a long history of racial discrimination against the indigenous and Afro-Peruvian population. Yet Peruvians are a sceptical people, well aware that they are yet to feel the full impact of the global financial downturn.
Food, however, is something all Peruvians can get excited about. Cholo or negro, sambo or Chino, a good Tacu Tacu – fried rice and beans served with meat or seafood and a fried egg – is something to celebrate. (When it comes to race, there is an almost total absence of political correctness in Peru. Peruvians cheerfully greet friends as negro or Chino, not always accurately. The former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori, who was of Japanese extraction, was known as El Chino.) The country’s cuisine is a mirror of its rich ethnic mix: Indians and Spanish conquistadores, Moorish cooks, African slaves, Chinese indentured workers, Japanese immigrants who arrived at the turn of the 20th century – all have put their stamp on the food.
Meanwhile, non-Peruvians have begun to take note. Madrid’s illustrious fusion culinary forum hailed Lima in 2006 as the “gastronomic capital of the Americas”; this January, Bon Appetit magazine went one step further, calling the country “the next great global foodie destination”; Anthony Bourdain feasted on 50-cent scallops-on-the-shell in a simple Lima cevicheria for his television show, pronouncing them “excellent” and worth $18 a pop at a Manhattan table.
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The first time I meet Acurio he is in his studio in Barranco, a bohemian, seaside district of Lima, in one of the elegantly faded mansions that the Chilean infantry missed when they marched through in 1881. The paint on the front door is peeling and the silver button burnished, but inside, everything gleams. Acurio, in chef’s whites, runs a hand through his unruly hair and motions for me to sit. This is his laboratory, he explains, waving towards a huge galley kitchen where two young chefs are hard at work.
Asked about his rhapsodic reception at the food fair, he laughs. “I didn’t invent anything,” he says. “I am taking advantage of a treasure that belongs to all Peruvians. So I can’t fail in my work. If I fail, I will be hanged in the Plaza de Armas.”
Acurio’s father, Gastón Acurio Velarde, was a senator for the popular action party headed by president Fernando Belaúnde Terry, and Acurio himself grew up among Lima’s elite. His family hoped he too would enter politics, and sent him to Madrid to study law, where he promptly and secretly decamped to cooking school. At the time, there was little prestige attached to cooking, and his parents were unhappy with the move. “My family taught me that I was a very lucky person in this country, that I have responsibilities. I was supposed to be a politician, that was to be the way to do it,” he says, with a shrug. “I just wanted to be a chef. In a way, I thought I was resigning those responsibilities, because being a cook for me was just making a restaurant.”
That belief was soon modified. “Fortunately,” he says, “I realised you can do thousands more things by being a cook for your country than you can by being a politician.”
After Madrid, Acurio moved to Paris to study at Le Cordon Bleu, where he met his future wife, Astrid Gutsche, a German pastry chef. In 1994, they returned together to Lima and opened their first restaurant, Astrid y Gastón. What began as a French restaurant evolved into Peruvian haute cuisine, as Acurio experimented with applying classical techniques to Peruvian ingredients and recipes. In 2000, he opened Astrid y Gastón in Santiago, Chile, to positive reviews, and followed that in 2002 with a branch in Bogota, Colombia.
“We realised then that we still needed to liberate [ourselves from] thinking that it was not possible to win with what we were doing,” Acurio recalls. In his first three restaurants, he was moving away from a cultural cringe that had blinded Peruvians to the value of their cuisine. “We were always taught to import culture from outside the country; now we realise that our food was a great product that we have invested in for the last 5,000 years.”
After his successes in Chile and Colombia, Acurio expanded apace, opening restaurants in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Mexico City, Madrid and Panama City. Last year saw his first venture outside the Latin world with a restaurant in San Francisco. Now, he says, New York, Dallas and London are all in his sights.
Not all these restaurants have been of the Astrid y Gastón brand. Using Lima as an incubator for ideas, Acurio developed La Mar, a sophisticated cevicheria where clever design gives the illusion of sunshine on the gloomiest Lima day; T’anta, a bistro-style restaurant with a delicatessen bar; Pasquales Brothers, a fast-food chain based on Lima’s thousands of chicharrón joints (which sell sandwiches of deep fried pork, salsa and fried sweet potato); La Pepa, a juice bar using Amazonian fruits; and Chicha, a casual eaterie focusing on regional cuisine.
Among his new projects, Panchita, an anticucheria selling steaks and barbecued meats (including the grilled skewers of cow heart its name derives from) opened in February. Madam Tusan, a Chinese-Peruvian restaurant, is slated for later this year. And a chain of luxury hotels is in the works. The list of other ideas being mulled over is dizzying, including a rotisserie chicken and chips franchise, an ice-cream store, a sweet shop and a potato and salsa chain.
Acurio has not been alone in championing a “New Andean” cuisine (some weary critics have branded the proliferation of “fusion” no more than a “confusion” and speculated he will overextend himself), but he was the first to understand the export value of his native cuisine. In the fading light of his studio, even amid a deep global economic downturn, Acurio’s faith in the opportunities afforded his generation of chefs seems unshakeable. “We came here to make French or Italian or Spanish restaurants, because we were trained that way in Europe. And we rediscovered our country. We assumed our responsibilities of our time, of this moment; we really feel that we are part of a movement.”
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Given Acurio’s fervour, it is apt that his strategy for global domination relies on a holy trinity: ceviche (which has already travelled widely and well); tiradito, raw fish in lime dressed with a range of sauces; and causa, a terrine of mashed yellow potato stuffed with seafood.
Transforming Peruvian cuisine into a high-end product – much as sushi was first perceived – is a key element in his plan. “Fifty years ago, the market outside of Japan for raw fish was zero,” he says. “Now Japan exports prime quality fish, miso, wasabi, Wagyu beef, Sapporo beer. They began with one icon – sushi was their flagship.” Acurio sees the same happening in Peru: in ceviche’s footsteps will follow niche export markets for producers of local staples such as aji, rocoto, Peruvian limes and pisco.
Mexico’s is the example he doesn’t want to follow. “Forty years ago, they started selling tequila and tacos. Everywhere in the world you will find Mexican food, but very cheap Mexican food. It’s difficult now to establish a fine dining Mexican restaurant – people have made up their minds.”
Paul Freedman, a Yale professor and author of Food: The History of Taste, agrees with Acurio on this point. “Once a ‘poor’ country’s cuisine becomes known, it’s difficult for it not to go down the Mexican road,” he tells me. “The assumption is that it ought to be cheap because the country’s poor.”
And yet he points out that Ethiopian food had maintained its integrity in the face of such assumptions – and he thinks “the stars are aligned” in Peru’s favour. “There’s no other country in Latin America that has what they have,” he says, “even though there are richer ones. Both Brazil and Argentina are thought of as being too meat-oriented, or too quantity-oriented – lavish but not particularly interesting. And people in the US have been hearing about how good the food is in Peru.”
The question now, Freedman says, is how Peruvian chefs and entrepreneurs can capitalise on that to reach a bigger audience. Sushi got its start in Los Angeles because young people embraced it. It was a case of “people power”, he says, rather than a master plan – or even of critics and sophisticated diners communicating downwards the desirability of raw fish. Sushi, like ceviche, was also seen as a healthy food. “In the restaurant business, if you put a Japanese word on something, even when it’s not low-fat, it communicates lightness. Japanese means elegant but austere. And part of sushi’s strength is its presentation. Neatness. Cuteness. You can pop them in your mouth. Americans love rolls!”
As it happens, one of the best known Japanese chefs in the world is also an exponent of Peruvian food. Nobu Matsuhisa, the man behind the Nobu Japanese fusion empire, moved to Peru in 1973, as a 24-year-old sushi chef. “I wouldn’t be who I am today without my time in Peru,” he says. “The biggest eye opener for me was how Peruvians ate raw fish. In Japan, we have it with soy sauce and wasabi. In Peru they used lemon juice and called it ceviche.”
And yet Nobu is not convinced that it is possible to control the image of an entire cuisine. “I don’t think you can market a cuisine so it’s accepted in a certain way. The people who eat it will decide that. You just have to have a strong concept and philosophy, and the passion to guide you, and it will spread around the world. Peruvian cuisine used to be good, but definitely not sophisticated. Gastón has made Peruvian food fashionable. I believe cooking, like fashion, music and architecture, is ever-evolving. With more chefs like Gastón, Peruvian cuisine will evolve and spread.”
Acurio himself is more convinced of this than anyone. Though his body language is relaxed and his smile easy, his language has a militaristic feel. “I always tell my staff,” he says, “that ‘the mission of our company is not opening restaurants. The mission of our company is globalising Peruvian food’.”
. . .
Three months after our meeting in Acurio’s studio, I am sitting in the shell of his latest venture, Panchita, as he samples his seventh steak of the day. The restaurant is in a huge industrial space, flooded with light and colour. It will be “La Mar with meat”, he says. Today, he’s signing off the menu, questioning the weight of every steak, its provenance, the layout of the salad bar, the presentation of bread baskets, the consistency of dressings.
Since our last meeting, some of the world’s biggest banks have tumbled, Barack Obama has moved into the White House with a $1 trillion deficit hanging over his head and Acurio has witnessed a potential (though unnamed) partner in a London restaurant go bankrupt. He tells me with a laugh that his doctor was sufficiently concerned about his stress levels and health to fix him up with a heart monitor the day before. Looking at the readouts at the end of the day, the doctor didn’t see any problems until about 1pm. “What happened here?” he asked the chef. Acurio laughs as he recounts the tale: “I had an important meeting. The chart went crazy.”
His financial health is also being monitored. “Irzio [Pinasco, one of Acurio’s three business partners] has asked me to take a look carefully at every recipe, the cost, so we can head off any problems later,” he says. Pinasco, a theatre producer who managed Peru’s 2004 America’s Cup football tournament, joined Acurio two and a half years ago and has declared consolidation the name of the game as the world’s biggest economies tip into recession. “We’ve always done this [costing],” says Pinasco. “But this year we’re focusing the whole company on the details, on production, on the back-of-house.”
Still, expansion is the endgame. An Astrid y Gastón has opened in Buenos Aires, and further ones are planned for Sao Paolo, Bogota and the Peruvian cities of Arequipa and Cusco. A T’anta for Dallas, Texas, is in the pipeline. (New York and London, once scheduled for 2010, have been postponed to 2011.)
Pinasco met Acurio after reading a speech he had given to students at Lima’s most prestigious business school in 2006. “I must have received that speech from five different people in my e-mail,” Pinasco recalls. “It was something a lot of people were inspired by, not only in terms of what can be done with our food, but in terms of what we can do with our country.”
Acurio may be costing his menus more thoughtfully than at any time in his career, but when he waves his steak knife in the air and confides that he has promised his family he won’t work weekends this summer – manning the grill at his place by the beach aside – I don’t believe him for a minute. He is on a mission, and Peru is watching.
Naomi Mapstone is the FT’s Andean correspondent
