Chef Virgilio Martínez Takes Peruvian Cuisine to New Heights

Chef Virgilio Martínez Takes Peruvian Cuisine to New Heights

At his top-ranked Lima restaurant, Central, chef Virgilio Martínez has created a menu devoted to Peru’s most ancient ingredients—and organized by altitude

By Howie Kahn in the Wall Street Journal

BEFORE HEADING even deeper into the mountains, and with dark clouds filling the late morning sky, Virgilio Martínez Véliz issues a warning. “I don’t want to scare you,” says the 37-year-old Peruvian chef, sitting in the second row of a speeding silver passenger van, “but there’s a thing that happens here in the Andes when it rains a lot. We call them huaycos. The rocks start colliding and sparking. Then the water rushes down. It takes everything, even the trees.” Thunder rumbles. Raindrops peck at the windshield. Recalling one particularly harrowing torrent, Martínez pops a wad of coca leaf into his mouth and confesses, “I remember thinking, ‘OK, now we are dead.’ ”

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Martínez regularly risks his life in the pursuit of improving Central, the restaurant he opened in 2009 in Lima’s affluent Miraflores district, two blocks from the Pacific. He has traveled to the Cusco region 47 times in the past three years, taking the short flight inland and upward. “In my kitchen,” he says, “we are about 250 feet from sea level. Here, we’re going on 12,000.” For Martínez, altitude is the key to understanding Peru’s rich biodiversity and ancient agricultural heritage. It’s even the structuring principle of his menu: Each dish is listed next to its elevation of origin. Ingredients from Cusco, the high-up heart of the Incan Empire, represent the literal peak of the meal in a dish called Extreme Altitude, inspired by what grows at 4,200 meters, or nearly 14,000 feet.

With storms still threatening, the van slows and parks beside the Laguna de Pomacanchi in rural Acomayo, a two-hour drive from the Cusco airport. The lake is motionless, a perfect mirror for everything above it: the thunderheads and scant sunbeams, the faces of the surrounding mountains we’re readying to ascend. Martínez hops out of the van, throws on a layer of fleece and looks around excitedly, taking in the peaks and the shore. His dark bangs fall boyishly, framing his eyes. He breathes in the thin air without difficulty. Martínez nods proudly in the direction of a basic brick and mud structure. “Before, no one would come here with me,” he says, pointing out that he’ll be hosting 20 Peruvian chefs in Acomayo this winter. “We’ll live in that cabin, share ideas and cook for a couple days.”

If contemporary cooking is largely about sourcing the rarest ingredients, then Martínez—traversing Peru from the Tumbes desert to the Amazon to the Andes—has taken that pursuit to extremes. It’s a significant shift from earlier in his career, when he exported his country’s best-known flavors, opening restaurants for the influential Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio in Bogotá, Colombia, and Madrid. At Central, on the other hand, Martínez wants to impress upon patrons from all over the world the idea that Peruvian gastronomy has directly affected the course of civilization. “Come on, man,” he says. “The potato is Peruvian. Potatoes come from here. Who haven’t we fed?”

Celebrated Brazilian chef Alex Atala has forged a similar path on his side of the Amazon and suggests that the international legitimization of high-end South American cooking will depend on its chefs exhaustively exploring their indigenous terrain. “An ingredient is not only flavor,” says Atala. “It’s culture, and to understand that culture makes a chef perceive his ingredient in a more intense and true way.” Atala predicts this ethos will spread throughout the continent. “In the years to come, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela will surely come up with their ‘new’ ingredients and new good chefs, too,” he says. “It is our duty to value them.”

 “I have two full-time jobs,” says Martínez. “Finding edible things that have existed here forever, since before the Incas, and introducing them to a modern-day audience.” To make his dual occupation official, Martínez founded the research organization Mater Iniciativa in 2012 with his sister Malena, a physician 13 months his junior. Together, the Martínez siblings journey to places such as Puno, in search of edible clay, or to Chanchamayo, looking for the boiled bark of huampo trees. Everything they bring back is cataloged in their database on two iMacs in the back corner of Central’s open-air kitchen (behind the bread station, adjacent to the climate-controlled chocolate cabinet and in front of the pacay tree). Additional input comes from anthropologists and scientists. Karime López, a 32-year-old Mexican-born chef, develops recipes full time with Mater Iniciativa’s findings.

Meanwhile, Virgilio’s 28-year-old wife, Pía León, runs the kitchen at Central, which is the reigning Best Restaurant in Latin America according to the region-specific rankings sponsored by Pellegrino. “Peruvian food,” says Martínez, cleaning his pocketknife with his T-shirt, “is so much more than just ceviche at the beach.”

All along the miles-long trail, the Martínezes stop to bag samples, kneeling into rivulets, contorting through brambles, checking beneath rocks. The plant life becomes tougher and gnarlier as we ascend. Potential ingredients are everywhere, as demonstrated by our guides, several Quechua-speaking women from the Acomayo community, who are direct descendants of the Incas. “This is their annual walk to gather medicinal herbs,” Martínez explains, noting that he’s been building up trust here since founding Mater. “The first time we came,” he says, “they thought we were crazy. The idea of cooking with some of these ingredients doesn’t make any sense to them. It would be like putting Xanax in a dish.”

In their heavy wool skirts, black polleras embroidered with panels of brilliant neon, the women march up the mountain. Thin sandals made from recycled truck tires protect their feet from the steep, rocky ground, and felt hats with wide brims shield their faces from the unforgiving wind. At around 14,000 feet, Maruja Mamani Tito stops and reaches into her k’eperina, the Technicolor carrying cloth fastened across her back, and gently lifts out her nine-month-old son. “This is what it takes to be a Peruvian chef,” Martínez says. “You need to understand that we all carry each other.”

Gastón Acurio, whom Martínez still recognizes as a mentor, echoes the same sentiment. He has long understood that Peruvian cuisine doesn’t have the brand recognition of French, Italian, Mexican or even Danish food. He believes that pushing its agenda requires a unified front. “That’s our mission as Peruvian chefs,” he says, having recently appeared with Martínez and United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon at a cooking demonstration in Lima. “Sharing and helping others all the time, building community. That’s how we’ll seduce the world with Peruvian food.”

In a wide, flat clearing, Trinidad Mamani Cascamayta, the group’s oldest member and de facto leader, has set up lunch. Spread out on blankets, the meal consists of Cascamayta’s thick, pancake-like tortillas made from mountain spinach and corn. She serves them with cubes of soft, mild cheese and a piquant green sauce made from rocoto peppers and huacatay, a kind of Peruvian black mint. In addition, there’s fresh salad made from other chopped herbs and a dish of hard-boiled eggs, still uncracked in their spotted, caramel-colored shells. Two pear-shaped vessels are filled with potatoes—in one, simple boiled tubers of a supreme creaminess; in the other, chuños, golf ball–size specimens imbued with the concentrated funk of a truffle and the texture of semi-stale bread.

‘Sharing and helping others. That’s how we’ll seduce the world with Peruvian food.’

—Gastón Acurio

Martínez explains that the chuños are the result of a labor-intensive freeze-drying process wherein the women harvest their crop, lay it out in a field to freeze overnight, walk on it to remove additional moisture and dry it further in the sun.

“We feel guilty if we don’t know all the potato varieties and all the processes that go with them,” Martínez says, popping another chuño into his mouth. “We are cooks,” he says. “It’s our responsibility to know everything.”

As Cascamayta begins to demonstrate how she uses her haul to make medicine, lightning bolts brighten the sky. Cascamayta smashes tejti, a kind of lichen, from the belly of a rock and mixes it with water to create a traditional antipyretic. “This is the first time we’ve seen this product,” says Martínez, lying on his stomach, propped up on his elbows in the manner of a child watching Sesame Street. She continues, mixing mutuy, the leaves of the indigo plant, with yawan chanca, a root, in a batch of freshly whipped egg whites. “Meringue altura,” Martínez says to his sister—a mountain meringue. These are all ideas Martínez will consider incorporating into the next iteration of his menu. Sometimes he’ll change only a few items, but this February saw a complete overhaul, with 18 new courses.

Suddenly, the temperature drops sharply. Lightning strikes closer, and it begins to rain. Tito suggests we begin our descent. “We beat our altitude record today,” says Martínez, pausing to collect more flora on the way down. “Forty-four hundred meters [14,435 feet]. That’s the highest we’ve ever been.”

VIRGILIO MARTÍNEZ began his career as a chef with a different kind of foraging. In his teens, he was a devoted skateboarder, and for a time he was training to compete professionally, before severely injuring his shoulder. Spending entire days skating the streets of Lima challenged Martínez to think creatively about food (school was less of a draw). “You want to feed yourself well,” he says, “but you don’t have much money.” The son of a bank lawyer, Raúl, and an architect, Blanca, Martínez found himself getting to know vendors all over town. “We’d buy the greatest fruit,” he says, “and put together salads on the street.” He’d also track down anticuchos: “barbecued beef hearts marinated with chilies,” he says.

Though he seldom skates now, Martínez still possesses the laid-back attitude of a boy on his board, which can help in a bind. When we flew home from Cusco, for example, Martínez was stopped at security. “I had all these labeled plastic bags filled with plants,” he says. “Drugs are big here. They catch a lot of people with drugs. The police wanted to know what I had in those bags.” Taken away for a private screening, Martínez played it cool. “Eventually,” he says, “the police recognized me and started suggesting recipes.”

Riffing on his favorite snack as a teenager, Martínez begins most meals at Central with beef hearts, but powdered over a dollop of potato purée in a small hand-glazed ramekin. To him, there’s no better introduction to an already formidable national cuisine than his own dressed-up take on two of Peru’s seminal ingredients: the potato, to which he feels a responsibility bordering on ambassadorial duty, and heart meat. It’s a perfectly pitched salutation—and it’s heart, so unpack that symbolically.

“You know what I hate?” Martínez says. “When people say, ‘Oh, your restaurant is amazing; you make me feel like I’m in Paris or in New York.’ Don’t tell me that,” says Martínez, shaking his head and pointing to the banquette near the door where he sometimes naps between wrapping up service at 2 a.m. and heading to the airport at 4 a.m. for the first flight out to Cusco. “This dish,” he says firmly, “is Welcome to Peru.”

More and more of the world’s discerning eaters are flying here for the purpose of culinary discovery, and an increasing number of international chefs are looking to Lima for inspiration as well. This winter, José Andrés, for one, opened China Chilcano, serving chifa (Peruvian-Chinese food), among other traditional plates, in Washington, D.C. Erik Ramirez, who cooked with Daniel Humm at New York City’s acclaimed Eleven Madison Park, is following suit with the Llama Inn, set to open in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Even Barcelona’s esteemed Albert Adrià paid homage to Peru with his 2013 venture Pakta (it means union in Quechua), focusing on Nikkei recipes, the popular fusion of Japanese and Peruvian foods that stemmed from Peru’s large number of immigrants from Japan. With such a wide range of bold and rustic flavors, Peruvian is a cuisine that clearly travels well. In that spirit, Martínez himself has also opened two hit restaurants in London: Lima and Lima Floral. “The money from London funds Mater Iniciativa,” he says.

In December, Martínez traveled from Lima to Napa, California, where chef Christopher Kostow invited him to participate in his annual Twelve Days of Christmas celebration at his three-Michelin-star Restaurant at Meadowood. “My whole staff was really taken with him,” says Kostow. “He was telling stories about loading up with big bags of clay and hiking out of the jungle. That’s a hell of a lot more romantic than mushroom hunting.”

‘You know what I hate? When people say, ‘Oh, your restaurant is amazing; you make me feel like I’m in Paris or in New York.’’

—Virgilio Martínez

To Kostow’s point, Martínez’s descriptions of the work that goes into Central resonate as both magical and back-breakingly difficult. Trips into the Amazon are marked by the mortal danger of nuts falling at high speeds from giant trees. “You have to wear helmets,” says Martínez, “because they can kill you.” With the number of new plants ingested, poisoning and choking are imminent risks as well. Martínez, who has taken to traveling with translators and botanists, recalls once eating a succulent he shouldn’t have after misunderstanding his local guide’s Quechua. “She said something like, ‘It makes the air better,’ and I took that to mean that it’s good for breathing when she actually meant they believe it has the power to stop the wind. It got stuck in my throat for a while; very uncomfortable.”

Some of the ingredients he’s most proud of bringing back to his restaurant sound made up. Take, for example, cushuro, the caviar-shaped cyanobacteria he serves alongside another beautifully aged potato product called tunta. He uses it in the aforementioned Extreme Altitude dish—flanked by courses representing zero meters (Octopus in the Desert) and 2,750 meters (Mountain Beef, seasoned tableside with additional dehydrated beef heart)—and somehow it captures the feeling of standing in the thin Cusco air: Its goodness is subtly dizzying. “Cushuro grow like bubbles after the rain in the mountains,” Martínez says before heading back into the kitchen, where he and León work shoulder to shoulder and back to back every night he’s in Lima. “They’re almost impossible to find.”

Just above the Sacred Valley of the Incas, about 100 miles from Acomayo, and a world away from Central, Martínez beelines from the van down a steep, red-dirt slope. “This is the spot,” he says. “We need to start working here immediately.”

Back in Lima, he’d unveiled extensive blueprints for the future headquarters of Mater Iniciativa, complete with a recipe lab, space for bench science, a comprehensive seed bank, dorms for visiting researchers and chefs and a restaurant with an uninterrupted 360-degree view of the Andes. He says he hopes to start development later this year, but he’s already treating the idea with urgency. Most ambitious, though, is what Martínez is articulating now: his desire to farm in the manner of the Incas.

He asks me to imagine the conical pit we’re in, landscaped into a series of tiers. Scholars theorize that the Incas used the same method to grow hundreds of species of crops. “By using different elevations,” he says, “they could essentially create microclimates, controlling the amount of sunlight the plants received, the irrigation and even the temperature.” In other words, agriculture has been highly advanced around here for a very long time.

Up the road, Martínez sits down on a ledge at Moray, an Incan ruin and a semi-preserved example of what he’s just described. It feels like being at the Colosseum if the Colosseum had been a farm. He tucks a pinch of coca along his gumline and stares down into the concentric, dipping terraces below—circle after circle—mesmerized.

“How unbelievable would it be to do our own system to understand theirs,” he says, taking in the vastness of the site. Martínez runs his fingers through the pebbles and eyes the perimeter, extending his gaze across the plains, toward the Sacred Valley and the snowcapped Andes in the distance.

“We didn’t have a plan when we started Central other than auteur cuisine with lots of ego,” he says, “lots of ‘me’ and ‘How do I surprise people?’ But coming here changed my whole outlook. The answers and the emotions are all here, in our history.”