The High Life



At Zig Zag.  At first I thought the waitress was making fun of us for being gringoes by making us wear the bibs, but they turned out to be necessary because of the splattering juices from the sizzling meat.

There are a lot of great things about traveling on a budget. In a way, actually, you're much closer to the daily lives of the people in the country you're visiting - you shop at their grocery stores, take their buses, buy cheap used books from the same hole-in-the wall stores.

Ceviche.  Note that these pictures
are all kind of crap because I took them
 before I realized my phone
camera had a flash. 

That said, there are definite benefits to the other kind of travel. During my last week in Colombia, driven by a fit of money panic, I ate little more than rice, eggs, bread and vegetables in various permutations. (There aren't many.) Peru was pretty much the opposite of that, food-wise, thanks to my dad, who's been traveling with me for the last week.

On his first day in Lima, Dad and I went to the Huaca Pucllana, an old pre-Incan ruin with a well-known outdor restaurant overlooking the archaeological site. I got the ceviche, seafood "cooked" in lime juice. It came, as is pretty standard, with plantain chips, two kinds of corn - boiled and fried - and yucca, a root almost but not quite too starchy to be edible. The fish and scallops were buttery-smooth, although I was less enamored of the pulpo - octopus - which in addition to having gross little suction cups still attached to its tentacles was also kind of rubbery.



Granita, creme brulee, suspiro and lucuma custard.

 The best part of this meal, though, was the dessert. Dad and I got the dessert sampler, which came with little cups of creme brulee layered with tomatillo jam and a sweet graham-cracker-like crust; a custard made of lucuma, an Andean fruit that tastes a little like a smoky sweet potato; a pisco sour granita; and suspiro a la limena, (literally, "sigh, Lima-style), a dulce de leche custard with dense meringue on top.

The following day we went to La Rosa Nautica, a restaurant in a series of gingerbread Victorian cupolas on a pier in the Pacific. We got the special of the day, a mixed seafood grill for two.


You can just barely see how weird and alien the octopus looks.



The platter, when it came, looked like it had been eaten by an entire octopus. The suction-cup-studded purple tentacles that had grossed me out the night before were in full display. At first I ate around it. Scallops, white fish, calamari. Finally, I tried the octopus.

It was incredible. By far the best part of the dinner, and one of the best things I've eaten in Peru. Smooth, just slightly chewy, and incredibly flavorful. Turns out octopus is actually pretty delicious.

The other surprise came in Arequipa, a city surprising in itself for the quality of its restaurants (and for its crushing altitude, and for its beautiful white colonial streets...) We went to a restaurant called Zig Zag, famous for its 'stone-grilled' meats. Not quite sure what that meant, Dad and I both ordered the beef-pork-alpaca sampler with creamed quinoa on the side. Our meals came literally on a stone, still sizzling, surrounded by little dishes of anchovy butter, herb mayonnaise, and aji garlic sauce. The meat was on the rare side, but I cooked the pork a little more right on the stone. Against all odds, the alpaca - a famously tricky meat, easy to cook into gamy cardboard, was the most delicious of the three meats, smooth and tender and, when covered in anchovy butter, pretty much perfect.

Dad leaves tomorrow, so it's back to rice and eggs and three-dollar fried fish lunches. Not that I could keep this up for that long - I've been eating a ton. But it was good while it lasted.