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Cross the mountains and seas at a small table.
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Without understanding the local ingredients and not speaking English very well, it is difficult to understand the popular Peruvian restaurant Central. With a total of 16 dishes of altitude menu, the altitude spanned from the minus 25 meters under the sea to the highland mountains of 4350 meters, and I was already a little confused halfway through eating, of course, it may be because I ordered a cup of heavy mouth.
Each restaurant has its own way to do fine dining. Prior to Central, the representative restaurant of Peruvian cuisine fine dining was Astrid y Gastón, opened by Peruvian gastronomic ambassador Gastón Acurio. Also through the dishes to show the local customs, Astrid y Gastón uses a way of bringing together ingredients and cooking techniques from all over Peru, while Central is even more ruthless, not only the ingredients, but also the entire landscape and even the ecosystem are brought to the table for diners to see, hardcore.
Interestingly, Central's chef, Virgilio Martinez, who worked at Gastón Acurio's restaurant in Madrid, also caught Gastón's attention for improving his dishes beyond the line.
(Central Chef Virgilio Martinez)
That incident may have been one of the reasons why Virgilio was determined to return to Peru to open his own restaurant. After opening, Central quickly became a star restaurant in the dining scene in Peru and Latin America. Also a regular on the world's top 50 restaurants list, Central ranked sixth in the world in both 2018 and 2019, and Astrid y Gastón fell directly from 39th in 2018 to the top 50 in 2019. This may also be related to the former's avant-garde concept and the latter's slightly conservative concept.
Unlike some chefs who grew up in the kitchen or in their natural environment, Virgilio was born in the city of Lima and grew up in a cooking environment that had little to do with cooking. He grew up in a time of social upheaval, and everyone around him wanted to flee Peru. Virgilio, on the other hand, left his homeland to work and live in restaurants around the world by becoming a chef.
Back in Peru, Virgilio encounters a dilemma similar to that of most chefs in the documentary Chef's Table: Do you just want to make delicious food? Or do you want to express a certain idea of yours through the food on the plate, or promote a certain food culture? Is it to awaken people's attention to food ecology, or to explore the relationship between food and nature?
In the search for ingredients from all over Peru, the path belonging to Virgilio and Central gradually emerged.
Although peru is not very large, it is rich in topography. The abundant seas, the mysterious Amazon jungle, the majestic plateaus and the Andes Mountains all extend to different types of ingredients and cooking methods. Virgilio has designed an altitude menu that brings together ingredients grown at different altitudes, allowing diners to swim on the seabed and then suddenly be pulled up to a plateau of more than 4,000 meters above sea level, experiencing the wonders of different ecological environments and food on a single table.
(Looks like a coaster, but the back is actually a menu)
As the soul of Central, Virgilio controls the restaurant's direction, with two strong collaborators behind him. One is his wife, Pía León, who is mainly responsible for the management and operation of the kitchen. She recently opened a new restaurant, Kjolle, which finished 21st on the 2019 list of the top 50 restaurants in Latin America and was my favorite of the eight meals I ate in lima over four days.
(Pia Leon)
The other was Virgilio's sister, Marlena Martínez. Malena and Virgilio, who have a science background, founded Mater Iniciativa, a research organization that analyzes ingredient species, to support Central's ingredient collection and menu development. In addition to the chefs, there are also experts and scholars in various fields, who go up to the mountains and the sea, visit different ecological regions of Peru, and record the information of various ingredients and raw materials, cooking methods, and the stories behind them. After your meal at Central, you can also visit Mater Iniciativa to satisfy your curiosity about these unpopular ingredients.
Gastón Acurio once took a friend to Central for dinner, where he thought he would eat a typical dish such as roasted guinea pig until he was almost finished with a meal, before his peruvian food was served. Gastón laughed and said to his friend, I didn't bring you here to eat the Peruvian food you're familiar with.
For a foreign diner who is not even familiar with traditional Peruvian cuisine, it is even more difficult to understand Central. The restaurant also designed the menu in the form of a circle to see, which made people look dizzy.
From the first course, my mind was in a state of chaos, constantly torturing myself: What is this? What did I just eat? What is this dish of ingredients that I can't understand at all?
But it's all coming, and you still have to struggle.
01. Red Rocks -10M
The journey up and down to sea begins with this red rock at an altitude of minus 10 meters, and the ingredients on the menu are Chilean sea squirt (piure), barnacles (percebes) and clams.
The clams are made into a translucent yellow object using molecular cooking techniques, and they taste sour and fresh. The barnacles are eaten by digging a small bite and placing them on crisp slices made of chilean thick sea scabbards and taking them together. Unexpectedly, the umami flavor of Chilean thick sea squirt crisps is very prominent, rather like a shrimp slice snack.
Well I know you don't quite understand what a Chilean thick sea squirt is... Distributed along the coastlines of Peru and Chile, this creature looks like rock on the outside but is blood-red when cut. The name sounds a little disgusting, but it actually looks even more disgusting. Oh, it looks like this.
Let's talk about the next one.
02. Desertic Coast 110M
Hmmm well... It's still a platter of ingredients that don't seem to know what the ghost is.
From left to right, a cactus fruit with seaweed is fluffy, with a crispy tuber grass (oca) in the middle and clams with chili oil cheese sauce on the right, and red cactus fruits are also used in the cheese sauce. Servings just enough to appetize.
03. High Altitude Farmlands 3750M
The altitude rises to a plateau of 3,750 meters. The ingredients for this dish are mainly black and yellow tubers, golden lotus (mashwa).
Peru has more than 4,000 varieties of potatoes, with different colors, shapes and tastes, and in a big city like Lima, ordinary people are exposed to no more than 10 varieties. Potatoes are actually not very rigorous, this type of crop is collectively called tuber crops (tuber), including taro, yam, potato, etc., and in the Andean mountains, widely planted tubers are the tubers golden lotus (mashwa, also known as the tuber dry lotus), uluco (olluco) and tubers sorrel (oca) and so on.
Although they all look similar, restaurants process different tubers into different dishes to accentuate the flavor. This dish uses two types of black and yellow tuber golden lotus, including cream shortbread made of yellow tuber golden lotus and crisps made of yellow tuber golden lotus, with sauce made of black tuber golden lotus, and pickled duck meat on the right.
Zoomed in, people with dense phobia may be a little unwell. The two tubers of golden lotus, black bitter and yellow and sweet, if not compared together, diners will probably rarely have the opportunity to impress with such ingredients.
04. Amazonian River 110M
The giant arapaima, which inhabits the Amazon basin, is one of the largest freshwater fish in the world and is made into a fish cake in a restaurant.
And this small piece of white food next to it is one of my favorite ingredients in Peru this time, ice cream beans (pacae).
This ingredient is taken from the ice cream bean trees of the Andean Mountains, and if you go to Kjolle for dinner, the waiter will serve you the ingredients as they really are. The flesh is removed from the pods and is soft and sweet in the mouth, as if you were eating ice cream or marshmallows. According to Kjolle's waiter, this ingredient is the most popular food for the people of the mountainous areas of Peru to be fed by their parents when they are young, and it is especially useful for coaxing small children.
(Ice cream beans)
It's a pity that I only eat a small piece of each meal, otherwise feeding it would be useful to me.
05. Upper Jungle 890M
In the general restaurant, it should be used as a pre-dinner bread link, and it is placed in the fifth course. The bread here is made from a plant called "dale-dale" in the Amazon rainforest, which is fried and unground, using the core and root of this plant, respectively.
What I prefer is the sauce that goes with bread, the black one is a cream made with copoazu, a plant that also grows in the Amazon rainforest and tastes similar to cocoa. The other cream is made with sachatomate, with a distinctly sweet and sour taste, and as a tomato lover, of course, you don't hesitate to liquidate it.
06. Sea Terrain 15M
There are also some dishes that are not impressed, such as this one, which uses squid, sargassum and a carob called huarango.
07. Waters of the Desert 88M
Some of the ingredients above may be difficult to accept, but in the following dish, each of them is a common and attractive ingredient - a large and sweet sea urchin, covered with a layer of avocado and pumpkin (loche) puree, and accompanied by shrimp boiled broth, which is a wonderful umami symphony.
08. Extreme Altitude 4350M
The highest one in the menu has finally appeared. This dish uses kiwicha, kculli and peruvian corn, two types of corn, the latter of which is large and soft in texture, and is often used as a side dish of raw ceviche in ceviche.
09. Mil Moray 3600M
Central not only carries ingredients to the table, but also presents the cooking methods of the locals. In the highland area, the locals will use the rock to stew the tuber crops (tuber), so the entire cooking site of the rock stewed tuber crops will be brought together to show you.
Mention the name of the dish, Mil Moray. In 2018, Virgilio opened a new restaurant called Mil in the Sacred Valley area near the ancient city of Cusco, also close to the ruins of the Moray Rice Terraces. Located at an altitude of 3,500 meters, the 8-course menu is designed with ingredients from the highland mountains, such as the tuber crops above, and also offers a service of eating while inhaling oxygen to prevent diners from eating altitude sickness.
10. Amazonian Lake 190M
Probably one of Central's most circulated dishes on the web is this piranha version of the Stargazing Pie. In fact, this thing can't be eaten, but it is just a decoration for a dish taken from the Amazon rainforest next to it. Piranhas and cassava are used, and even if I had forgotten the taste of the dish, I wouldn't have forgotten the fiery eyes of the piranhas looking up at the stars.
11. Marine Valley -25M
The lowest dish in the menu uses scallops, a pumpkin called mace and sea lettuce. The textures and flavors of several ingredients vary, creating a complex sense of taste hierarchy.
12. Plain Forest 135M
Underneath the foam of smoked pork (cecina) is a mixture of plantain and Amazon river prawns, seasoned with black peppers, a modern version of Amazonian cuisine.
13. Andean Woods 2980M
The staple is lamb, with a slightly bitter sauce paired with crisp and sweet olluco and long strips of air-dried goat milk to balance the rich sauce flavor.
14. Amber Forest 240M
15. Green Mountain Range 2800M
16. Medicinal Plants 3580M
Dessert triple combo. Ingredients include cacao, which is used in almost every fine dining dessert in Peru, and coca leaves, which can alleviate altitude sickness.
In the final tea, there is also the algae cushuro from the Chef's Table documentary that grows in the highland lake.
Interestingly, this tea, which uses cushuro algae, also uses a yellow flower called kjolle.
And kjolle, mentioned above, is the name of a new restaurant independently opened by Virgilio's wife, Pía León.
One final question I would like to talk about is, what is the significance of the Central team going up and down the mountain to bring these local ingredients to the table? Or some people may say, I can eat pasta, steak, why eat these strange things, the taste is not necessarily liked?
The problem is that with the development of the globalization of food, food crops such as rice and wheat have become dominant in the world, resulting in the squeezing of the living space of the food that local people in some remote areas have relied on for thousands of years. For example, quinoa, which is now considered a healthy food, was once a traditional crop of the Peruvians, but after the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, colonists forced the locals to grow wheat, resulting in a significant reduction in the area of quinoa cultivation. It was only recently, when the nutritional value of quinoa was valued, that it gradually became a popular ingredient, and the price soared rapidly.
However, there are many unknown ingredients that can only exist silently in the corners of the land, which may be buried under the barren soil of the Andes, lying in the crevices of the rocks along the Pacific coast, or hanging in the bushes deep in the Amazon jungle. In harsher environments, these ingredients are the food of generations of locals. If these food crops can also grow well in harsh environmental areas, then in addition to their value as food, there may be more scientific and medicinal value, which will help us solve biomedical problems, which is one of the important reasons why many people are committed to preserving biodiversity.
And among them, maybe there will be the next "quinoa", which will become a hot internet red food on the global table?
After all, hundreds of years ago, potatoes and peppers originating in Latin America were also unfamiliar ingredients.
Central
地址:Av. Pedro de Osma 301, Barranco, Lima
URL: centralrestaurante.com.pe
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The author is a contracted author of NetEase News and NetEase "Each Has An Attitude"