#1 restaurant in the world!! (la Central) Lima Peru. My experience 2017.

My experience at 'la Central' (2017 Chefs choice restaurant #1 in the world)

In the beginning of the year 2017, I traveled with my brother to South America, Peru.
A friend of mine lived there for 6 months so we planned a 4week holiday to visit him and travel around this beautiful country. After 4 weeks of traveling having seen Machu Picchu

After having done a 4 day Inca trail and after climbing Rainbow Mountain (5,020 m),

all extremely awesome experiences, we decided to fly back to Lima and try to visit one of the best restaurants in the world.

La Central

Chef's choice number one restaurant in 2017. I still don't know exactly how we did it but a couple of days before we had to fly home we tried to reserve a spot. My friend knew some people and we managed to get in. This would turn out to be my number 1 culinary experience of my life and I'm about to show you why. At la Central, all the dishes u get are from local products.
The menu shows u at what altitude the product where harvested or caught. This is what the menu looked like.

( my brother, long time friend and new friend)

When we saw the menu we were really excited. Not because we knew what kind of dishes we were getting. But because we were clueless what half of the ingredients were...;) So if u could please take a look at the menu and tell me which one this dish is, u can refresh my memory because I'm not sure. The only thing I'm sure of that it triggered my eyes and mouth.

Luckily the waiters were so kind to tell us what was eatable and what was not..;) They sometimes give us a dish where I was clueless what to do with it. That made it obviously very funny at times. So, we waited for the waiters to tell us what to do so we would not have tummy pain the next days (eating a rock where the dish was presented on). This is what the next dishes looked like and take a minute to look at those beautiful little art pieces.

Now.... can u understand why this was my number 1 culinary experience? This is what happened next. We gave our biggest tip we could afford wich wasn't a bad one in my opinion. The waiter started counting the bills and I will never forget what he said next. '' It's okay... '' at first, I thought he was gonna laugh next but he didn't. Are u kidding me is what I thought? We gave them €80 tip. We could eat for 2 weeks straight in Peru with that kind of money.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that we were 30minutes late and they had to call us that they would give away our table when we wouldn't be there in 10 minutes. So we jumped in the crappiest taxi in the whole of Lima and rushed towards the restaurant where we arrived 15 minutes later. For others, this probably looked very funny arriving in a beaten up car to the most luxurious restaurant in South America where somebody was waiting at the door to welcome us. After all, this maybe explains why they reacted that way. Nevertheless, the experience was amazing and I hope u enjoyed this story.

Cheers,

ErnstJan