Peru, Day 11: A Stroll Through Lima

After the excitement of yesterday’s unusual art-and-food tour,we decided to take things a little easier today and visit some of Lima’s museums and churches. We had also booked a table at Astrid & Gastón, one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, three months in advance. Today, our journey through Peruvian cuisine would continue.

Our first stop today was the Larco Museum (Museo Larco). Founded in 1926, this privately owned museum occupies an eighteenth-century viceregal mansion. It is renowned for its collection of pre-Columbian pottery and jewelry, spanning 5,000 years of history.

The museum has several galleries. Its Gold and Silver Gallery displays an extensive collection of jewelry, ornaments, clothing, and everyday objects once used by prominent rulers of pre-Columbian Peru.

The Cultures Gallery traces the long history of pre-Columbian Peru, while the remaining galleries present archaeological objects of many different kinds.

The museum holds nearly 45,000 ancient and beautifully crafted objects, including stonework, pottery, textiles, gold and silver ornaments, and other handicrafts.

Row upon row of pottery crowded the shelves. Sometimes I wonder how anyone could possibly examine so many objects one by one. Perhaps visiting a place like this is less about seeing every exhibit than about absorbing the atmosphere of an ancient civilization.

And speaking of experiences, I have to mention the museum’s mysterious—and widely famous—gallery of erotic pottery.

These ancient pots and vessels portray *scenes from the lives of ancient Peruvians with remarkable directness. The veneration of sexuality is common to many ancient civilizations; similar sculptures and objects can also be seen in India, for example.

Many schoolchildren were visiting the museum with us. I imagine they were not going into the erotic pottery gallery.

The children studied inside, and outside as well. Beyond the museum was an exceptionally beautiful garden.

The garden’s bougainvillea is famous too. Red flowers, green foliage, pale yellow walls, brown earth, and a brilliant blue sky—the colors could hardly have been more perfectly harmonious.

Add the solemn, impassive stone figures, and the entire courtyard seemed even more serene and still.

Yet the presence of the children brought a touch of liveliness to this quiet courtyard.

Everything was lovely.

Beside the garden was a comfortable restaurant with only a few diners.

We had lunch there. Both the cooking and the flavors were excellent—a place well worth recommending.

After lunch, we left this pleasant little museum for a much larger one: the Lima Art Museum.

The Lima Art Museum (Museo de Arte de Lima) is one of the city’s cultural landmarks, located in the Parque de la Exposición in central Lima.

It houses Peru’s most representative art collection. Its nearly 17,000 works span thousands of years, from the earliest Andean civilizations to the present day, and include photography, painting, pottery, decorative arts, and prehistoric artifacts. The displays are arranged chronologically in four sections: pre-Columbian, colonial, republican, and modern. Four additional galleries are devoted to textiles, silverwork, photography, and painting.

In the entrance hall, we saw a contemporary work made from a stack of ordinary tiles. The artist had cut away part of the stack, apparently to suggest the geography and terrain of Peru.

The Lima Art Museum is enormous. One look at its impressive staircase gives you a sense of the building’s scale.

Up the stairs, the second floor held a large collection of paintings.

“At the Lima Art Museum, you can see at a glance how Peruvian oil painting evolved: from early religious works that closely imitated European models, to biblical scenes incorporating Peruvian elements, and finally to paintings whose subjects broadened to embrace Peru’s people, customs, and landscapes. A short walk through the museum feels like a journey through the entire history of Peruvian oil painting. Standing before these works, you can almost see the country’s artists pursuing and exploring their own artistic paths.”

After touring the second-floor galleries, we descended the staircase on the other side, left the museum, and headed for Lima’s Plaza de Armas.

The Plaza de Armas, also known as the Plaza Mayor, is one of Peru’s great sources of pride. It is surrounded by Spanish-style buildings, including the Government Palace, City Hall, and the cathedral. Nearly every Peruvian city and town has a Plaza de Armas at its center. The name is said to have arisen because governments often displayed weapons in these squares, allowing the public to see them up close. Over time, they all came to be called plazas de armas.

Spanish-style arcades and finely wrought balconies could be seen everywhere around the square.

There was a red fire engine, too.

And a red open-top double-decker sightseeing bus—with my reflection alongside it.

Peru’s Government Palace stands between the Plaza de Armas and the Rímac River. On important holidays and ceremonial occasions, the president watches the festivities in the square from the balcony at the City Hall end of the palace and addresses the public.

Another landmark beside the square is Lima Cathedral. It has two towers; I photographed one of them.

The cathedral’s interior was naturally resplendent with gold. But our understanding of Christianity is limited, so it did not resonate deeply with us. By then, one grand cathedral had also begun to feel much like another, and church fatigue had set in. Once we had looked around, we left.

A short walk from the cathedral brought us to the Monastery of San Francisco, best known for its library and catacombs. The library contains countless ancient religious texts, while some 70,000 people were once buried in the catacombs. Visitors can see innumerable skulls there. The sight was astonishing, but not sinister: the remains had been arranged according to the wishes of the faithful, and there was no sense of anything dark or malevolent. Photography was not allowed, so it was something we could only experience in person.

After leaving the monastery, we still had a little time, so we wandered around the streets near the square.

We browsed a few shops.

Then we headed to Astrid & Gastón, one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants and the flagship of modern Peruvian cuisine founded by renowned Peruvian chef Gastón Acurio and his wife, Astrid Gutsche.

Gastón Acurio may well be the most famous chef Peru has ever produced. He later received the Diners Club Lifetime Achievement Award.

Gastón’s life story is fascinating too. Born into a wealthy family, he was sent to Spain to study law. But he had no wish to become a lawyer; he wanted to be a chef, a profession that commanded little respect at the time. His parents eventually accepted his decision and sent him to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, one of the world’s leading culinary schools. There he met the love of his life, Astrid, a pastry chef.

After returning to Lima, the couple opened their own restaurant, Astrid & Gastón. It began as a French restaurant, but Gastón later turned his attention to Peru’s traditional cooking and extraordinary diversity of ingredients. He ultimately realized that his mission was to create food with Peruvian roots and introduce it to the world. He went on to build a South American culinary empire with annual revenue of US$1.2 billion and more than thirty restaurants. Astrid & Gastón itself became one of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

One of the restaurant’s most popular features is its open kitchen. Through an enormous glass window, diners can watch the chefs working in a confined space, constantly slipping past one another. Their movements resemble a dance, and amid that dance they create delicious food.

The restaurant changes its menu every two months. It relies mainly on local ingredients from Lima, supplemented by fresh seasonal produce, so diners can experience Peruvian flavors in their most authentic form.

The chefs are especially skilled at weaving ancient crops from the Andean highlands and the Amazon rainforest into the menu.

The presentation was not especially outstanding, but the combinations of flavors were superb—genuinely exciting. When we eat at a restaurant like this, we prefer to concentrate on the food and rarely take photographs. A couple of quick phone shots are enough.

On this subject, chef Gastón Acurio once said: “I don’t particularly like it when people are busy making phone calls or taking photographs while enjoying a meal in my restaurant. But what I dislike even more is restricting food lovers, or telling them what they may and may not do.”

That is my kind of chef.

Peru, Day 11: A Stroll Through Lima

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