An article by Condé Nast Traveler, leading American magazine specializing in tourism and leisure, suggested that the “future of gastronomy is being cooked up in Peru.”
Kevib West, the article’s writer, begins by highlighting how blessed the country is with a mind-blowingly fertile ecosystem where way more than 3,000 varieties of potatoes can be found. He also noted Lima is emerging as a new global culinary epicenter.
“Many critics have proposed that Peru is the next Scandinavia—a region that has gestated a new generation of great chefs dedicated to radical localism,” he pointed out.
West explains that Peruvian chefs are experimenting with the equally archaic grains kiwicha and can~ihua, exploring such a patrimony as if it were a virgin continent newly opened for the world to taste, a collective quest sometimes called Nuevo Andino or just Modern Peruvian.
This culinary experiment is a uniquely 21st-century movement—a kind of Wiki-cuisine with contributions from the huariques and the gastronomic temples, from Peru’s ancestral Moche culture and the global culinary avant-garde.
In this regard, he said molecular gastronomy is only the most recent foreign influence to stretch Peru’s incredibly elastic culinary imagination and cites as an example of this Peruvian chef Virgilio Martinez’s Central restaurant in Lima, which was named the top eatery in Latin America.
In the article, Peruvian famous chef Gastón Acurio is described as “the emperor of New Andean cuisine”, since he is leading a reverse conquest of the Peruvian table.
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Published: 9/30/2014