Lima (my current city of residence) is huge and swallows you whole. It pays no heed to blog posts you need to write or e mails that need returning. So the tardiness of this post is through no fault of my own; all the blame can be put on this enormous and sprawling city that feels like it has no end, where the streets all have similar names and there is no grid-like rhyme or reason to the layout of the streets. (Just a joke, but in all seriousness I have spent much of the past week trying to figure out this behemoth of a city, and, unfortunately, not gotten much farther than a 6 block radius of my apartment.)

So I should start with my experience in the jungle, which is chronologically where I left off from the last post, but first a short detour to last Friday (I would say the highlight of my trip thus far), when I had the honor and good fortune of meeting Gastón Acurio, one of Peru’s (and, many would say, Latin America’s) most well known chefs.
First, a bit of background. One of the biggest draws of this program for most people is the independent study project that gets completed your last month here. The topic is, as the name would suggest, picked by the student, and within my group they range from the rise of evangelism in Lima to the impact of UN Convention 169 on indigenous rights to the mixture of indigenous and western traditions in the composition of modern Peruvian music. Combining my interest in eating and writing about food, I chose to study how Peruvian food has changed in the past 30 years, and how globalization is forcing it to morph into a product that is suitable for an ever expanding and changing global market. Focusing specifically on one dish—causa—which is basically a cake of mashed potatoes mixed with ají amarillo (yellow pepper) and mayonnaise and topped with anything, ranging from avocado and tomato to lobster, I am looking at how and why the cuisine of Peru is changing in the ways that it is.
So, for this topic, all signs pointed to Gastón Acurio as the man to talk to, because he is at the cutting edge of contemporary Peruvian food. He owns 15 or 20 restaurants in at least 4 countries in Latin America, Spain and the US, and his flagship restaurant, Astrid y Gastón, is consistently rated one of the best in Latin America. Luckily for me, Dean Karlan, Jake’s co-author, likes Gastón’s restaurants and is a frequent visitor to them, and was nice enough to give me his phone number. Mentioning Dean’s name was like having a golden ticket, and 10 minutes after I had e mailed Gastón’s secretary on Friday morning, I had a meeting for 4:30 that afternoon. Immediately I set to trying to get as much information about him as I could, so I could feel prepared to talk to him.
At 4:30 I arrived at his office and was ushered up a flight of stairs into the top floor of an apartment building that had been furnished with a state of the art kitchen, a waiting room decorated with the prizes he’d won and articles written about him, and a beautiful model kitchen that looked like it was used for photo shoots. After waiting for about 20 minutes, I was called back to the model kitchen where he was being interviewed by another journalist. The first thing he asked me was whether or not I’d visited any of his restaurants, and when I said that I’d tried to make a reservation but couldn’t get one he said “well I’m sure we can arrange that,” and before I knew what was happening I had a reservation for me and my 6 friends that night.
Figuring that things probably couldn’t get much better than that, we sat down to talk and I began asking him a bit about the changes he’s seen in Peruvian food in the past 20 years. We spoke for about 30 minutes, during which time he told me about his bigger picture project; as he explains it, as long as Peru is exporting a majority of crude natural resources, the country is destined to stay in a lower economic sphere, and will never develop to the level of the US or Western Europe. In his eyes, bringing up the level of cuisine of Peru, by focusing on everything from the physical space of the restaurants you design to the quality of the ingredients you use to the decorations you make on the plates you serve, is the first step in developing the products and services of Peru, so that they can eventually become known around the world as high end products. That is his mission, and he is putting a finger in every pie that he can to realize it. It was incredibly interesting to speak with him, and he even obliged me by speaking in English so I could understand our interview.

The restaurant itself is not showy: there is no big sign (there is, in fact, no sign at all, only the name written on the side of the building), nor is the building big and ornately painted. You wouldn’t find it just walking around Mira Flores—the upscale Lima neighborhood that houses it—you would have to know where you’re going. Once you walk inside, though, you see what Gastón means when he says that he is focusing on every little detail. We sat at the bar, so we didn’t get to see the dining room, but even from the little we saw it is clear that he is a man on a mission; the bar is beautiful white stone that looks like marble, but there are light fixtures underneath the stone so it looks like it’s glowing. The room that houses the bar has small tables and couches, where patrons who are waiting for their tables sit and sip on expensive and elegant-sounding drinks, like the insert drink name here, of which I had three and can assure you are quite tasty. The room is dimly lit and there is a quiet ambient music on in the background, to assure the patron that she is not in a stale tourist restaurant, but a cutting edge, cosmopolitan culinary Mecca. All that, and we hadn’t even been given our bread yet.
Having no idea what we were in for—would we get a menu and get to pick what we liked? Would he just send out some things?—we sat down at the bar and ogled the beautiful surroundings. After sitting for about 10 minutes, the courses started rolling out. The first was the causichas—a spin off of the causa that I was studying—with five different small causas, topped with everything from a lobster salad to crab claws. After that came the ceviche, which was just soulfish—a white fish with a dense texture and a creamy flavor—and ají (hot pepper) marinated in lemon and lime juice.
Then came the octopus.
Jake had told me about the octopus, insomuch as it was the best he’d ever had, but other than that I had no idea what to expect. Until I came to Peru, the eight legged creature scared me, and every time I saw it on a menu all I could think of was the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when Eddie Valient walks into the bar and the octopus a bar tender, standing behind the bar making 4 drinks at once. But, fortunately for me, ceviche mixto includes octopus, and so without even thinking, I tried it and took a liking to it. In ceviche it really acts as a foil for the acid and pepper, and so the strongest impression it leaves is its chewy texture and a sound like a boot on packed snow.
This octopus was completely different. I don’t know how it was prepared—it tasted like it may have been grilled because it had a slightly charred taste—but the texture was smooth and soft, the flavor very mild and almost creamy. It was served with a sauce that I couldn’t describe except to say that it complimented and brought out the flavors in the octopus incredibly, so when you took a bit the flavors and texture mixed in your mouth and felt like a taste bud massage.
In my mind nothing topped the octopus, but the last three plates were still very good in their own right. The cuy (guinea pig) crepes—blue corn crepes that had a touch of sweetness with breaded and fried guinea pig meat and a satay peanut sauce—and braised lamb with brown sauce were followed by a sampling of desserts, which ranged from maracuya ice cream to an intense chocolate cake. Six courses and three hours later we left the restaurant feeling like we were on top of the world: filled with some of the best food in Lima that we had been graciously given by one of the most popular chefs in Latin America.
For me, it could not have been better.

And now, to bed.