In Search of Peru(vian Cuisine)

I first visited Peru in 1979 and, except for brief layovers at Lima’s Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chávez, I haven’t visited the country for nearly 30 years. At the time of that early visit, on a backpacker budget, I survived mostly on roasted chicken, which is indeed a Peruvian specialty – in fact, one recently closed restaurant in Berkeley specialized in the dish.

Unfortunately, my reliance on pollo a las brasas blinded me to the rest of what is undoubtedly the South American continent's finest and most diverse cuisine, though I didn’t have the knowledge to appreciate it at the time. Fortunately, in the intervening years, there’s been a boom in Peruvian gastronomy in both Santiago (think Barandiarán) and Buenos Aires (think the homey Status or the more elaborate Bardot, among many).

When I’m home in California, though, my options are limited for a cuisine that I could happily enjoy at least weekly. After four or five months in South America, when I’m back sleeping in own bed, I’m usually tired of eating in restaurants and, when I do go out, I’m rarely close to outstanding restaurants like San Francisco’s La Mar or Half Moon Bay’s La Costanera.

In the East Bay, unfortunately, our Peruvian options are limited and we have to settle for simpler fare. We greatly enjoy the comida criolla at Berkeley’s Arriba Perú, a few blocks from the University of California campus, but they inexplicably do not offer ají de gallina, one of my favorite Peruvian dishes. Nor do they have a liquor license, so pisco sours are not an option (though once, when I inquired about it, they served us their limonada especial (“special lemonade”) on the house (presumably evading the letter of the law). We usually bring a bottle of our own Argentine or Chilean wine to accompany their ceviche and other seafood dishes.

Sunday night, though, we ventured with friends to suburban Alameda (no relation to the Avenida del Libertador Bernardo O’Higgins, the alternate name for Santiago’s main boulevard) to dine at Chicha Bistro, a new Peruvian option that’s not much farther away than Arriba Perú. It’s not an elite restaurant, but dishes such as adobo de chancho (marinated pork, with a side of fried sweet potatoes) are abundant and flavorful (I appear to have regained every ounce a 20-mile bicycle ride through the Oakland Hills on Sunday). I passed on the ají de gallina this time because the pork (pictured above) sounded so appealing, and it was indeed flavorful.

What tips the scale over Arriba Perú is that Chicha does have a liquor license to serve pisco sours (suitably tart, pictured above) and even Peruvian wine (a deep red Intipalka Tannat, pictured below, that I had no idea was even produced in Peru, as the varietal is almost exclusive to Uruguay). Chicha Bistro easily passes the “Would I go back?” test that I apply to restaurants, though we would have preferred a quieter ambiance.

Being authentically Peruvian, Chicha even shows football on a wall-mounted TV – but last night, it was American handegg rather than the soccer I would have expected. I won’t go back very soon, though, because next week I’m flying to Santiago en route to exploring Patagonia for several months.

China Dam(n)s Argentine Patagonia?

For some years now, there’s been controversy over the ecological impact of several new dams planned for Chilean Patagonia, and concern over the deforestation required to build transmission towers through thousands of kilometers an almost roadless area. That’s still unsettled but, in the interim, plans for similar hydroelectric projects in Argentine Patagonia have gone almost unnoticed outside the country’s borders.

Environmentally, the parallels are imperfect. On the well-watered Chilean side, exposed to Pacific storms, the dense native forests are vulnerable and erosion could be severe; on the Argentine side, the Río Santa Cruz meanders through seemingly endless steppe. In April of 1834, according to Charles Darwin, Captain Robert FitzRoy of the HMS Beagle organized an excursion up the broad Río Santa Cruz, around the site of present-day town of Piedra Buena (the bridge pictured above crosses the river just south of town), but the strong current forced the crews of three whaleboats to pull the vessels upstream from shore.

As Darwin described it, the river (pictured above) “runs in a winding course through a valley, which extends in a direct line westward. This valley varies from five to ten miles in breadth; it is bounded by step-formed terraces, which rise in most parts, one above the other, to the height of five hundred feet, and have on the opposite sides a remarkable correspondence.” Over three weeks, the expedition managed to ascend roughly 140 miles and came within sight of the snow-covered Andes before turning back; an ascent that took them nearly six days of hard labor took just one to return to the Beagle, anchored on the Atlantic coast.

Given the terrain that Darwin describes, the hydroelectric potential is obvious and, in fact, there are two dams planned at sites downstream from the popular tourist town of El Calafate. The more westerly of the two will be named for the late president Néstor Kirchner, husband of current president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, while the more easterly will take its name from Jorge Cepernic, a former governor of Santa Cruz province.

While the ecological consequences of flooding parts of the sprawling Argentine steppe may not be quite so dire as deforesting the Chilean side and submerging its rushing whitewater, the project is not without controversy. First proposed in 2007, it failed to find adequate funding and then, three years later, a Buenos Aires-based consortium took it over. That lasted only briefly, though, after a dispute between the province and the federal government, followed by a new contract with a different group and the Chinese  construction company Gezhouba, which built the controversial Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze.  The cost, though, will be nearly US$1 billion greater than the previous bid, raising questions as to where all that extra money will go.

Argentine Winery Restaurants Make Global Top Ten? Plus, an Exchange Rate Update

A month or so ago, I wrote about my experiences eating at nine of Latin America’s 50 best restaurants, most of them in Argentina, without (I hope) taking the survey too seriously. Then, recently, I stumbled upon another survey of the world’s 20 best winery restaurants and found that I had dined at two of the top ten, both of them in Argentina.

One of those is Francis Mallman’s 1884, which also appears in the Latin American top 50 list, while the other is the oddly named Urban, at the O. Fournier winery just outside the town of San Carlos, in the Uco valley of southern Mendoza province.  Oddly named, I say, because Fournier’s view of the Andes beyond the restaurant’s windows is positively bucolic – there’s no city view anywhere.

Urban may seem a misnomer in such a rural area as San Carlos, but its contemporary design and the menu, which shifts between strictly Argentine and Mediterranean, suggest a sophisticated urbanism. As with 1884, I’ve only been there once, but I look forward to returning the next time I update Moon Argentina.

For those who can’t make the trek south to San Carlos, the Mendoza city suburb of Chacras de Coria offers Nadia O.F., an outgrowth of Urban. Chef Nadia Harón devises a weekly tasting menu paired with Fournier’s own wines, though diners are welcome to bring their own for a modest corkage fee.

EXCHANGE RATE UPDATE

As the southern summer approaches, and I prepare to update Moon Patagonia, I start paying more attention to the exchange rates in Argentina and Chile (I probably won’t be spending any time in Uruguay until late next year at the earliest. I’ll also be visiting the Falkland Islands but, over the course of a week that I’ll spend there, the exchange for the local currency should be stable (at parity with the pound sterling, it’s now around US$1.60). The cost of living itself is relatively high in the Islands, however.

Argentina is, of course, less predictable, given the breach between the official dollar (about 5.9 pesos as of today) and the informal “blue dollar” that roses briefly above 10 pesos as last Sunday’s congressional elections approached and then subsided slightly to about 9.9 by Friday. At the parallel market rate, Argentina’s very moderately priced, but navigating that market anywhere outside of Buenos Aires can be tricky. In fact, it can be tricky for anybody who doesn’t know his or her way around.

Chile, where dollars have abounded for years and the citizenry isn’t much interested in foreign currency except when they plan to travel, is a different case. That said, over the past couple weeks, the dollar has been gaining ground, having risen from 492 pesos in mid-October to 508 pesos today, a difference of three percent in just a fortnight. I wouldn’t necessarily extrapolate from that trend but, at the moment, it looks as if vacations in Chile might be a little bit cheaper this year.

Contradicting Condé Nast: My Top 5 South American Cities

Recently, Condé Nast Traveler used its Readers’ Choice Awards to produce a list of the Top 5 Cities in Central & South America. In principle, I’m averse to such listicles but, nevertheless, I can’t look away completely. Thus, I’ve decided to comment on the survey and, then, produce a list of my own that will, hopefully, provided a credible corrective or supplement. I subscribe to the magazine – at about US$12 per year, that’s no big sacrifice - but the survey itself appears online.

Condé Nast’s No. 1 city is Buenos Aires (pictured above) which, of course, I cover in my own city guide and in guides to Argentina and Patagonia (additional comments below). No. 2 is Cusco which, though I haven’t visited Peru for many years now, is certainly a credible choice for its Inka and colonial heritage, and as a historic gateway to Machu Picchu. I got to know it in my backpacker days and, though it’s certainly changed now, it’s hard to dismiss it from such a list.

No. 3 is Cartagena, Colombia (pictured above and below), for which I have a special affection as the first memorable city I ever saw in South America (flying from Costa Rica, I landed in the grubby Caribbean port of Barranquilla, which I’d sooner forget, but nearby colonial Cartagena’s walled city was unforgettable). Fortunately, I was able to return a few years ago, and it was better (though notably more expensive) than I remembered it from my backpacker days. I’m bewildered, though, that the magazine would even have to suggest visiting “the old part of the city, as well as the newer areas…” since the old part is the only part worth visiting. In the newer part, you might as well be in Miami.

No. 4 is Paraty, Brazil, a surprise choice that I really know nothing about. Personally, in my limited Brazilian experiences, I would choose Bahía (Salvador). No. 5 is Antigua Guatemala, the colonial capital ironically saved by an earthquake that forced the movement of the political capital 30 miles east to present-day Guatemala City. Antigua, which I covered in an early edition of Moon Handbooks Guatemala, has a remarkable critical mass of colonial architectural treasures, even if some of them are ruins or semi-ruins, and the presence of a rich Mayan culture in and around it.

My own Top 5 differs significantly from Condé Nast’s, but then it’s not crowd-sourced like theirs, which relies on polling based on vague standards of culture, friendliness, atmosphere, restaurants, lodging and shopping. I take a different approach which, though still subjective, has parallels with the standard I use to evaluate restaurants: “Would I go eat here again?” This reflects my own experience and, over the course of three decades experience, it covers the places I most look forward to returning to. The order that follows below is random.

BUENOS AIRES

In this I concur with Condé Nast readers, even if I detest the “Paris of the South” cliché – which needs to be retired sooner rather than later. Buenos Aires is not a European metropolis, but rather a New World immigrant city that’s more analogous to New York. For my part, it helps that I own property there, so I have all the benefits of travel while still being able to sleep in my own bed.

VALPARAÍSO

From my East Bay home, San Francisco is less than 20 minutes away by the Transbay Tube, but I rarely go there except en route to SFO for a flight to Argentina or Chile. I prefer to spend time in Valparaíso, the first major Pacific port on the Round-the-Horn route to the Gold Rush and, with its steep hills, cranky funiculars, brightly painted houses and cool summer fogs, “Valpo” is South America’s San Francisco. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it also has longstanding historical links with California, as Isabel Allende (now a California resident) showed so vividly in her historical novel Daughter of Fortune.

COLONIA DEL SACRAMENTO

Barely an hour from Buenos Aires by ferry, the walled city of Colonia del Sacramento was a buffer between Portugal and Spain, and then between Brazil and Argentina, until Uruguay became an independent country. Towns of its antiquity, with its cobbled streets and low-slung houses, are unusual in southernmost South America. It’s a walker’s delight.

MENDOZA

At the base of the Argentine Andes, Mendoza is a commercially driven world wine capital whose downtown street trees form, in the words of the late Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, a “roof of leaves woven together like the fingers of a huge circle of inseparable lovers.” Its park and plazas are a delight, while its backcountry can boast the “Roof of the Americas” in Cerro Aconcagua, the Western Hemisphere’s highest summit.

PUNTA ARENAS

Stretching along the Strait of Magellan, Punta Arenas was Ground Zero for the “wool rush” that transformed the Patagonian steppes, in both Chile and Argentina, into massive sheep ranches that clothed Europe and made a handful of entrepreneurs rich and influential (more so in Argentina than in Chile, however). They left some memorable architecture, and the city’s also the gateway to the Fuegian fjords (pictured below).