My experience of South American food from the three months we spent there at the end of our year around the world was generally poor. How could a continent that provided us with so many of the most brilliant staple ingredients have such rubbish cuisine? And I don’t just mean the roasted guinea pigs. South America gave us potatoes, sweetcorn, tomatoes, chillies, peppers, peanuts, pineapples, the list goes on. Yet we spent most of our time there wishing we were back in South East Asia or Australasia.
Okay, to be more specific we spent most of our visit in Chile, and whether trying local restaurants in towns well off the tourist trail or opting for Lonely Planet favourites we found the food to range between passable and irredeemably horrid. Meat, meat, meat, uninspiring and usually served with suspect salad. Even their fantastic seafood was treated with sad disrespect by every kitchen we encountered. Odd forays into fine dining were predictably miserable. But perhaps we haven’t given Peru a fair shake yet, as our time there was centred on the tourist hotspot of Cuzco. The food was adequate tourist-fodder, at least up a notch on their southern neighbour. Lima we missed.
Which brings me to
Ceviche, a friendly little joint in Soho that gave us a chance to explore more Peruvian delights. There was a nice buzz to Ceviche, as someone who works ground crew on the runway at Heathrow might say. Or as I might say, it was so astonishingly noisy that you had to hold direct-to-ear nightclub conversations with the other people at your table. This did result in me drinking rather too many pisco sours, as it was easier to keep my lips occupied that way than by trying to keep up a meaningful discussion. Maybe that’s their intention?
To the food. We tucked into some good ceviche of sea bass in tangy lime and chilli based marinade. If you’ve never enjoyed ceviche, this was a fine specimen as an introduction. I also picked out a variation that included basil and green mango. Oddly, it was less than half the size of the standard ceviche which for the same price seemed (perhaps unintentionally) mean and the mango and basil didn’t do anything exciting to the dish. I’ve had some dazzling ceviches (in Miami, not Peru) and they could certainly try harder here.
Some very nice skewers of grilled beef heart, one thing I do recall fondly from the continent. If you’ve never tried heart, it is muscle and so more akin to meat than to other offal. Grilled it has a deeply savoury, salty taste. The grilled fish and chicken skewers were also good, though hardly particular to Peruvian cuisine. Causa is a layered dish of cold mashed potato and various toppings. We tried a luridly colourful one of coriander mash with a beetroot topping, it looked the part and tasted… nice. I can’t really go beyond nice. The more typical causa, topped with avocado and a seafood cocktail, was a much better dish.
We washed our meal down with pisco sours and a number of other pisco cocktails, the best by far being a delicious concoction involving passion fruit and cinnamon. The staple pisco sour was also a good specimen, not over-sweet nor too strong. Our friend Tim stuck with wine but couldn’t find a glass that was any more than hmm. His advice: stick to the pisco. Puddings were okay rather than astonishing. Dulce de leche ice cream had the taste but lacked the expected slick deliciousness of that gooey South American treat. The lucuma ice cream had such a subtle hint of the fruit that it may as well have not been there.
If you want to try Peruvian cuisine, or you want to relive your trip to Machu Picchu, I’d say Ceviche delivers a solid experience of the staple dishes that everyone knows. Albeit without the fried guinea pig. But they don’t seem particularly adept when it comes to lifting these staples to another level, or riffing into the world of more refined cuisine. Stick to the basics and you’ll have a good time. With all the pisco sours we managed to rack up £50 per person including tip but every dish is under £10 so your bill is pretty much in your own hands.
