Food Tours and Cooking Classes in Peru

Criolla is the base: Spanish technique, Andean and coastal ingredients, African influence from the colonial period. Causa, ají de gallina, anticuchos, papa a la huancaína.

Chifa is Chinese-Peruvian, and it is not a fusion invented for restaurants: it is what happened when a hundred thousand Cantonese workers stayed. The first formal chifa restaurant opened in 1921, and the word itself comes from a Cantonese phrase for eating rice. Lomo saltado, the dish most visitors meet first, is documented from the late nineteenth century, and its connection to Chinese wok technique is established rather than legendary.

Nikkei is Japanese-Peruvian, later and more deliberate: Japanese cutting and restraint applied to Peruvian fish and chillies. It is why the ceviche you eat in Lima is marinated for minutes rather than hours, a change that came from Japanese cooks and is now standard.

A useful measure of where this has ended up: in 2025 a Lima nikkei restaurant was ranked the best restaurant in the world, two years after a Lima criollo-Andean one held the same position.

You will see ceviche described as UNESCO heritage, and the wording matters. What was inscribed in 2023 is practices and meanings associated with the preparation and consumption of ceviche, an expression of Peruvian traditional cuisine.

It is the practice that is recognised, not the dish: the fishing, the buying, the communal eating, the fact that it is a lunch food eaten fresh and never in the evening. That last point is real and worth following. Ceviche is eaten at lunch in Peru, because the fish came in that morning, and a cevicheía that is still serving it at ten at night is serving something that has been sitting.

Peru also has a national ceviche day, on 28 June, established in 2008.

On the origins, we are going to be careful where most sources are not. Both the pre-Hispanic and the colonial accounts have serious support, and neither is settled: raw fish with chilli and salt is documented long before contact, and maceration in fermented fruit juices is attributed to the Moche, but limes and onions arrived with the Spanish. The honest formulation is a pre-Hispanic technique with colonial ingredients. The often repeated Quechua etymology has never had its primary source found, and the story about English sailors is an anecdote rather than an etymology.

Lima sits in a desert and gets 6.4 millimetres of rain a year, which is close to nothing. It is also grey for months at a time, with only about 1,284 hours of sunshine annually.

The explanation is the Humboldt current, which runs cold water up the coast and holds a permanent deck of low stratus cloud over the city. Out of that cloud comes the garúa, a drizzle so fine it barely wets the ground. In winter, from roughly June to October, the cloud does not burn off at midday as it does the rest of the year, which is why Lima in August can go a fortnight without anyone seeing the sun.

For a food trip it matters less than you would think, since almost everything happens indoors or under cover, but it does mean August is 19 degrees and grey while February is 28 and bright.

Bottled water is the standard recommendation for visitors in Lima, and we will leave it there rather than take a side, because the local position is genuinely contested. A health ministry analysis published in recent years found chlorine below threshold and contamination in a number of districts; the water utility responded that its supply is compliant and its residual chlorine adequate. Both statements are on the record.

What follows practically is the usual advice, which does not depend on resolving the dispute: drink bottled, be thoughtful about ice outside established restaurants, and treat raw salads with the same care as anywhere with a different microbiology from home. Public health guidance recommends hepatitis A vaccination for travellers here.