Lima Food Safari Day 2
Today is the big day. It’s what we’ve been training for (or truthfully, not training for) our whole lives.
Breakfast: Farmer’s Market
10 AM: We head to the farmer’s market for my favorite food in the world: free samples.
After sampling all the olives, quinoa, butters, jams and cheeses (the backpacker's amuse busche) we order breakfast at a couple of the stalls.
I order a Peruvian cold pizza egg thing. Brittany gets a gluten-free, vegan torpedo muffin.
Both were yummy and leave us a little hungry. But we know we need to be saving ourselves. Lunch is right around then corner.
Lunch: La Picantaria
11:25 AM: This place doesn’t take reservations so we arrive early to avoid the crowd. I get a fresh squeezed orange juice on the street from one of the fresh squeezed orange juice guys. It’s 67 cents and mind blowingly delicious.
11:30 AM: They allow us to sit at the bar while staff is eating staff meal. We get giant pours of white wine and fresh-out-of-the-oven, Peruvian cornnuts
12 PM: The restaurant officially opens and we get seated. This place is funny. Super kitchsy. People sit family style along two big picnic benches. Everyone wears bibs, the table cloths are plastic, colorful flags line the restaurant. Around every corner, I expected to find a piñata.
The way it works is you order a whole fish. They make half of it into Ceviche and the other half is cooked however you want it.
Lunch was excellent. It was by far our most expensive meal we’ve had in S. America so far (we’ve had meals as cheap as $1.25) but I love the fact that for our super-fancy lunch we wore bibs.
4 PM, I need a snack.
We had one rule for our food safari: “No gazelles. Only the big five.” In non-ethan-and-brittany-code speak, this meant no filling our stomachs with non-awesome food. While in Lima we can only put amazing foods in our mouths.
But when I saw a new flavor of Doritos on the street I succumbed to the siren song of nacho cheese and broke the first rule of food club.
Eff it. Rules are meant to be broken and honestly, I doubt anyone would disagree with me on the fact that trying exotic Doritos flavors is a top 5 reason to dabble in international travels.
Anyway, this flavor was called Ruleta. It was so exotic I had never even heard of the word. I had to buy it.
When I read the back of the package, it turns out these were seriously like the Russian Roulette of junk food. All the chips were nacho cheese except for one suicide chip in the bag. That one gave you diarrhea.
It was like Doritos Dear Hunter. I played with fate for a total of three chips. But we had a huge dinner in front of us and I couldn’t risk the suicide chip so I decided to quit while I was ahead.
Fortunately it wasn’t too long until we had amazing gelato from a place called Blu recommended on our favorite travel blog.
Dinner: IK Restaurant
Finally at 8 PM, we would tackle Everest. We got a 9 course tasting menu. This is something we could never afford to do in the US at a restaurant of this caliber. But here the chefs are world class (Lima has more restaurants in the world’s top 50 restaurants than any other city) and the prices are about a third of what you’d pay in the US. It still probably ended up being the most expensive meal we’ve ever had (eg a bottle of water was $8) but it was a once-in-a-lifetime eating extravaganza that we’ll never forget.
Technical Cliffhanger: for whatever reason the pictures of dinner won’t load right now, so I’ll have to post them on a separate blog…to be continued.
