Why do Peruvian restaurants leave Brazilians in the slipper? – 06/20/2023 – Gross Kitchen

So the Central restaurant in Lima was voted the best in the world in the San Pellegrino water ranking. It is, in fact, relevant for the gastronomy sector in Latin America, for the first time at the top of the list – I will not discuss here the validity of this or any other award, I have already done so in other years.

I can finally go to the bar, climb on the table and say that I’ve eaten in the best restaurant in the world. I was at Central in 2012, eleven years ago, and I have nothing to say about the quality of the cuisine that won the 50 Best.

Something that has always intrigued me, both before and after visiting Peru, is why Lima’s restaurants and Peruvian cuisine enjoy much wider international acceptance than São Paulo and Brazilian cuisine.

Anyone who has never been to Peru and reads these gastronomy texts might think –I fantasized something like that– that Lima is a glutton’s paradise, where you stumble upon gastronomic treasures at every corner.

It’s not like that.

Lima is a very peculiar place, where it never rains and it drizzles all the time.

The food is undeniably good, but what most strikes the visitor’s eye is the social inequality. Lima is much more unequal than São Paulo. Perhaps it is at the level of Maceió or Manaus.

The sector of Lima where award-winning restaurants are located is tiny. Roughly speaking, the elite and haute cuisine are in three districts: Miraflores, San Isidro and Barranco.

In these neighborhoods, not all servants are indigenous, but all servants are white. The concentration of Lacoste shoes and shirts is impressive in the restaurants. The streets shine so clean, there are no people begging for money or camping on the sidewalk.

The rest of the city, which has 8.5 million inhabitants, shows the South American poverty that we are used to seeing in the outskirts of here. Only that traffic is a thousand times more chaotic.

Those who make gastronomy in Peru are the rich whites or those of Asian descent. Just like in Brazil. So why does Lima have three restaurants on the list, while São Paulo only has one?

I see two reasons.

The first concerns the Lima culture, what is eaten at home. The city’s rich incorporated the popular food tradition and extrapolated it, without embarrassment, in pedigree restaurants. It’s an authentic thing.

In São Paulo, there is an illusion of golden rosemary that finds itself European among the bugres. The elite table, apart from a bobó here and a feijoada there, imitates France, Italy and the United States.

To rescue –the verb indicates that things are off to a bad start– the cuisine from scratch, our chefs undertake expeditions, delve into bibliography, do ethnographic work.

Foreign look, in short. A notable exception is Casa do Porco –not by chance, the only Brazilian on the list of 50–, which creates on top of Jefferson Rueda’s hillbilly foundations.

The other Peruvian asset is state investment in gastronomy. The government there decided that food is a great card of diplomatic soft power. Applied and reaped results.

In Brazil, something similar has already been attempted, but the initiative never took off. We can follow Peru’s example and inject a river of money into promoting Brazilian food.

It is worth it? Me, despite taking my livelihood from gastronomy, I don’t think so. We have many more urgent knots to untie.

And, frankly, look at Peru: it is less notorious for the 50 Best than it is for the social upheaval that leaves no government standing still. We don’t just want food, do we?

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