This week, I am taking a one-issue break from writing the weekly 32963 “Mini Bite” dining reviews that will collectively appear in the 2026 Island Dining Guide you will be receiving later this winter – and am reporting instead on a culinary weekend in Lima, Peru, that did not go quite as planned.
A week ago, I finally had the opportunity to dine at the famed Lima restaurant Central, which for more than a decade has been regarded as one of the five best, and arguably the absolute best, of the world’s restaurants.
This restaurant has been the life’s work of founding chef Virgilio Martínez Véliz and his chef de cuisine, Pía León, who have been working together since before they were married in 2013.
As it happened, Chef Pía also has been running a restaurant of her own creation, Kjolle, just above Central, and seven years ago my husband and I dined there and wrote about it in this paper when we couldn’t get into the couple’s main restaurant.
That dining experience at Kjolle was wonderful – dishes comprised of simple Peruvian ingredients, rich and complex in flavor, textures and visual elements.
So we were expecting even better on this trip when we finally scored a reservation at Central: At last, an opportunity to sample its promised “tasting of 12 moments and 32 preparations that travels through the diverse and changing Peru: coast, Andes and Amazon.”
What I probably should have guessed from the billing, however, was that our highly anticipated three-hour dining experience, while certainly unique, would turn out to be more culinary theatre than an opportunity to savor more of the wondrous foods and flavors of Peru.
“We began as a simple restaurant showing Peruvian food,” Chef Véliz told an interviewer a couple of years ago. “I never expected any of this.”
Candidly, we didn’t either. The menu in today’s modern, airy restaurant – which itself resembles an art gallery – focuses a lot on ingredients from Peru’s different altitudes. While the courses are exquisitely presented (see photos at left), it is a stretch – in my humble opinion – to call some of the combinations food. It would be fairer to call the bites culinary art.
I’m glad I finally had an opportunity to visit Central, but I don’t believe I would commend this very pricey restaurant to a visitor wishing to get acquainted with Peru’s amazing dishes. It would be better (and a little easier) to book at the iconic Astrid & Gastón, longtime restaurant of chef Gaston Acurio, who put Peruvian cuisine on the world map.
Alas, a return to Astrid & Gastón, where we first explored the wonders of Peruvian cuisine more than a decade ago, proved impossible on this visit: It is closed on Sundays, we discovered, during Peru’s summer. And the current hot restaurant Maido, which we would like to have tried, has a waiting list of months.
So what to do? We did not want to leave Lima without gorging on great food! The cuisine we finally turned to on this visit was (drum roll) Chinese. While there are a number of very good restaurants in Vero which we write about weekly, good Chinese restaurants are not among them.
But as it happens, Peru – with its long history of Chinese migration – boasts a large Chinese community which makes up approximately 10 percent of the country’s total population. It also has a large number of what are called “chifa” restaurants serving traditional Cantonese preparations which have been adapted over the years to the Peruvian palate.
We were fortunate to get a last-minute reservation at what may be the best of them, TITI, and this attractive restaurant – operating since the 1950s – was packed when we arrived for Sunday brunch at 1:30.
Fortunately, we only had to wait about 15 minutes for a table, during which we agonized over page after page of tempting selections.
TITI more than lived up to its reputation. A simple classic dish like wonton soup was the most flavorful I’ve enjoyed in years, and the duck and chicken dishes were wonderful. And when we could eat no more, the check came to less than 10 percent of our tab at Central, proving once again that great dining doesn’t necessarily have to break the bank.
So on that very positive note, dining wanderlust temporarily sated, we concluded another all-too-brief stay in Lima. Our “Mini Bite” reviews of Vero restaurants will resume next week.
Photos by Tina Rondeau
