At first glance, Central’s 17 course tasting menu, drily entitled Elevations - a technical term used in the fields of topography and archaeology - hardly made my spirits soar. It struck me as a puzzling name for the wild culinary creativity I was greedily anticipating. This was, after all, a restaurant ranked fourth in the 50 Best Restaurants list so why, I hissed at my husband, a menu that sounded like a Geography seminar?
Three courses in and as I bit into the course called Dry Andes, a sublime frozen clay sourced at 3,900 metres above sea level, the genius of the menu’s name finally hit home. This is breath-takingly audacious food that grabs your palate, taking it on a vertiginous journey up and down the Peruvian landscape by bringing the terroir to your plate and elevating your dining experience to unimaginable heights.
All visitors to Peru come forewarned about the country’s dizzying altitudes. Between the Andes and the Amazon, the land swoops and falls with dangerous intent. Virgilio Martinez, along with head chef-cum-wife Pia León, have not only embraced this challenging environment, they have made it the centrepiece of their culinary style.
The duo conjure haute-cuisine out of rare indigenous ingredients discovered in the desert, the mountains, the jungle and the sea at altitudes anywhere between 25 metres below and 4200 metres above sea level.
In one dish, Extreme Altitude, algae found on sky-scraping river banks was sprinkled over an intense puree of two of Peru’s thousands of potato varieties, bursting in the mouth like vegan caviar.
In Rock of the Sea, a big meringue cracked open to reveal a foam of peachy clam, sourced at -8 metres. In between, we were served exquisite edible barks, roots and reductions of fruits we’d never heard of.
If all this smacks of taking cookery to extreme lengths, then you’d be right. Martinez is a member of the MATER Initiative, an interdisciplinary group of researchers dedicated to gastronomy as well as to celebrating Peru’s biological and cultural complexity. They are, in other words, gastronomic ethnographers. Perhaps this explains why courses were often presented amongst carefully curated collections of alien-looking botanical flora or on slabs of rocks, forming vignettes so stunning that if placed on a sideboard, they could well pass for objets d’art.
The calm intensity in the kitchen, open for all to see behind a glass panel, also resembles an art gallery with the serenity on display the antithesis of manic Gordon Ramsey type antics. The staff were refreshingly friendly, eager to share their passion about the food. Here it seems haute cuisine did not need to be haughty. At some point, a young man with floppy hair wandered by and asked us about the food.
“Who was he?” We asked our sommelier.
“Oh that’s just Virgilio,” she replied airily as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a chef of his standing to meander anonymously about his restaurant.
But then there is very little about Central that is normal. It is one of those rare breeds, a restaurant where words cannot do it justice. If you are lucky enough, I urge you to go and experience it for yourself because through Martinez’s gastronomy you will gain more insight into the complexity of Peru’s diverse culture and landscape than you will following the Inca Trail. For it is the extraordinary biodiversity of Peru itself that is the real star of Central’s tasting menu.
