El País del Ceviche: Comida, Identidad y Perú

Es muy especial.

It's very special.

And this technique is ancient.

Pre-Columbian.

Indigenous coastal communities were eating versions of cured fish long before the Spanish arrived.

Then the Spanish brought onions, the lime came from Asia via the trade routes.

So even in this one dish you have a whole history of contact and exchange compressed into a bowl.

Now, you mentioned the Japanese.

This is where it gets genuinely fascinating to me.

Los japoneses llegaron a Perú hace mucho tiempo.

The Japanese arrived in Peru a long time ago.

Late nineteenth century.

Japan was modernizing, there was huge economic pressure, and the Peruvian government was actively recruiting agricultural labor.

So tens of thousands of Japanese immigrants came over, settled mainly on the coast, and over generations they integrated completely into Peruvian society.

And their cooking fused with Peruvian ingredients in this extraordinary way that food historians call Nikkei cuisine.

Ellos combinan sushi con ingredientes de Perú.

They combine sushi with ingredients from Peru.

Exactly.

You take Japanese technique, the precision with fish, the respect for the ingredient, and you combine it with Peruvian chilies, Peruvian corn, Peruvian lime.

And what comes out is something that belongs entirely to neither tradition and completely to both.

Then there's the Chinese influence, which is just as profound.

La comida china en Perú se llama chifa.

Chinese food in Peru is called chifa.

Chifa.

I love that word.

And it's not Chinese food the way you'd get it in a Chinese restaurant in London or New York.

It's Chinese cooking techniques adapted to Peruvian ingredients over a hundred and fifty years.

There are more chifa restaurants in Lima than any other type of restaurant.

It's not ethnic food, it's just Peruvian food now.

That's how deep the integration goes.

Bueno, en Perú todo se mezcla muy bien.

Well, in Peru everything mixes together very well.

Everything mixes well.

And that phrase, I want to sit with that for a second, because it's doing a lot of work.

Because Peru is also a country with profound inequalities, a very complicated history of racial hierarchy left by colonialism, political violence in the eighties and nineties, and a political class that has, to put it gently, struggled to earn public trust.

So the fact that the food is this space where everything genuinely does mix, where no one culture dominates, is not a small thing.

La verdad es que la comida une a la gente.

The truth is that food brings people together.

Now I want to talk about one man, because I think you can't tell the story of modern Peruvian food without him.

Gastón Acurio.

For listeners who don't know the name, think of him the way you'd think of a chef who didn't just cook but actually changed how an entire country thought about itself.

Gastón Acurio es un chef muy, muy famoso.

Gastón Acurio is a very, very famous chef.

He trained in Paris.

At Le Cordon Bleu, no less.

Came home to Lima in the early nineties, which was a brave thing to do because Lima in the early nineties was a city living under the shadow of the Shining Path, economic collapse, political chaos.

And he made a choice that turned out to be extraordinary.

Instead of cooking French food, he went back to Peruvian ingredients and traditions and elevated them.

Él lleva la comida peruana al mundo entero.

He takes Peruvian food to the entire world.

He carries Peruvian food to the entire world.

And the thing about Acurio that makes him different from just a very good chef is that he understood something political.

He understood that Peruvians were ashamed of their food.

Not consciously, but they'd been conditioned by centuries of colonial thinking to see European food as sophisticated and their own food as peasant food.

And he said, no.

Your grandmother's ceviche recipe is world-class.

Let's treat it that way.

Ahora Lima tiene muchos restaurantes muy buenos.

Now Lima has many very good restaurants.

Lima is now, without question, one of the great food cities of the world.

And the restaurant at the top of that conversation is Central, run by chef Virgilio Martínez and his wife Pía León.

It topped the World's 50 Best Restaurants list in 2023.

Not second.

First.

The best restaurant in the world, according to the people whose job it is to say such things, is in Lima, Peru.

Sí, Central es el mejor restaurante del mundo.

Yes, Central is the best restaurant in the world.

The concept of Central is extraordinary, actually.

The entire menu is organized by altitude.

You start at the bottom, at sea level, with coastal ingredients, with seaweed and sea snails.

Then you move up through the river valleys, then into the high Andes, with freeze-dried potato techniques the Incas developed centuries ago.

Then down into the Amazon basin.

You're not just eating a meal.

You're eating a geography lesson about one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet.

Perú tiene muchos ingredientes diferentes.

Peru has many different ingredients.

Es especial.

It's special.

It is genuinely special.

And this brings me back to today, to the election.

Because here you have a country that is, politically, a mess.

No gentle way to say it.

Keiko Fujimori has run for president three times now.

Her father, Alberto Fujimori, ran the country through the nineties with an authoritarian grip, oversaw military death squads, was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity, and died in prison fairly recently.

She's carrying that legacy into this election.

A ver, la política divide.

Look, politics divides.

La comida no.

Food doesn't.

Politics divides.

Food doesn't.

And I think that's the genuinely interesting thing to sit with today.

Because whether you're voting for Fujimori or against her, whether you're on the left or the right, whether you're from Lima or from the highlands of Cusco, you grew up eating ceviche.

You know what a good ají amarillo smells like.

You have an opinion about lomo saltado.

That common ground is not nothing.

Es que todos los peruanos comen ceviche.

The thing is, all Peruvians eat ceviche.

All Peruvians eat ceviche.

And I think Acurio understood this very consciously.

He's talked about it in interviews.

He said that gastronomy in Peru became a project of national reconstruction.

That after the violence of the Shining Path years, after the economic disasters, after the political betrayals, food was the thing Peruvians could be proud of together.

Not their government.

Their kitchen.

Bueno, la cocina peruana es un símbolo nacional.

Well, Peruvian cooking is a national symbol.

A national symbol.

And it's one that was built from the bottom up, not imposed from above.

No government committee decided that ceviche would represent Peru.

It happened because the food was genuinely extraordinary, because chefs chose to believe in it, and because ordinary Peruvians recognized something true in it about who they are.

That's a rarer thing than it sounds.

La verdad es que Perú es un país muy especial.

The truth is that Peru is a very special country.

It really is.

Look, we don't know who will win this election.

The runoff is probably weeks away still.

But whoever ends up in the Palacio de Gobierno in Lima, the cevicherías will still be full at lunchtime.

The chifa restaurants will still be packed on weekends.

And somewhere in Lima tonight, someone will be eating at Central, working their way up through the altitudes of Peru, and thinking, this is the best meal I've ever had.

Sí.

Yes.

La comida de Perú es para siempre.

The food of Peru is forever.