On October 2, on a mission to learn more about Peru’s historical and culinary arts, Colin and I set off to one of the capital’s museums.
Lima’s National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History collection started with the oldest cultures. The old colonial house museum had pieces from each major culture in Peru’s history – most of them gathered from people’s burial goodies. The museum had some great pieces inside it including a model of the Temple of the Crossed Hands and the original Raimondi Stella. The museum also went into depth in information about a few select ancient civilizations, namely the Pukara Society and the Paracas Society. The Pukara were a society which had a ruling political/religious class which consolidated trading around the Lake Titicaca area. The Pukara traded their goods all over Peru and Bolivia – we saw examples of their stonework on our way to the city of Puno.
The Paracas were noted in the museum for their colorful funeral bundles, which were the source of much of the artifacts and information we have about their society. The Paracas Society transitioned through 4 phases, and during the final phase their society transitioned into the Nazca society. Early Paracas (800-550 BCE) had Chavin culture influence and many feline depictions, Mid Paracas (550-400 BCE) had geometric patterns on textiles and depictions of local elite, Late Paracas (400-250 BCE) had a large round-eyed being depicted with its’ head in its hands known as the ‘Oculate God,’ and the Final Paracas Phase (250 BCE- 200 CE) was smooth pottery and natural designs on textiles.
There were other culture’s artifacts on display from the Cajamarca Culture, the Lambayeque Culture, and the Wari Culture. Out of these cultures there was a small example of a man with a stone chaquitaqlla, a farming tool. The rest of the museum focused on colonial life and dress in Peru, which is far less interesting, and we were done pretty quickly. The only interesting part here were a couple of copies of old drawings educating people that a Spanish man plus an Indian woman would produce a Mestizo baby, and that a Mestizo man plus an Indian woman would produce a Cholo baby. At the very end was the former house of Simon Bolivar you could walk through.
While in Lima we decided to try a fancy restaurant we heard of - Astrid and Gaston. This place is known for its beautifully plated Peruvian fusion food. Their set meals are extremely expensive (especially on a backpacker budget!) at more than $120 USD per person. While the presentation was in fact quite pretty, Colin and I found both the service and the taste of at least half of the dishes extremely wanting. All in all, the place is pretty overrated, and it seems like only tourists get roped into eating there. I later learned that their head chef had recently left to start his own restaurant, and this likely contributed to the problem. But at the prices paid for a lunch you’d think they would have found a suitable replacement! Here goes the story:
We arrived and were treated to a welcome drink made with a liquor called Guinda of Huaura. This sweet drink included a frozen grape in the middle of the glass, which just fell apart as we munched on it. Along with this drink we got a little appetizer, which was quite creamy and delicious – and I wish I could remember what was in this little thing as it was one of the best dishes that afternoon!
Our “Sweets After School” tin school box came next, which was our favorite course of the afternoon. This tin came with the following goodies: meringue kisses (made with Black Botija olives and anchovies – and was actually not very sour as I’d expect!), charada (mini cookies with prawns and peanuts), mini ice-cream cones made with lucuma fruit ice-cream and covered in chocolate chestnut, and camotitos, little puffed pieces made with ginger and chicken skin. There were also barquillos included (long, thin cookies) which were served with a dip of lemon, basil, strawberry, rocoto pepper, and yogurt, pictured separately here.
The next course was “Home Memories.” The first course in this section was a beverage – I guess it could loosely be called this. It was basically apple juice served in a large ice-cube along with a metal straw. While there was a lot of “interaction” with this dish, it was a bit of a throw-away taste-wise. Not interesting and simply not tasty enough! This was followed by “Mom’s Patita” or suckling pig trotters with mustard and cress. This bite was really yummy, with a tasty crunch about it. The next dish, “Grandma’s Torrejita,” was very light and slightly fluffy, while slightly crispy too. This thin, flat, circular dish was made with chickpea, white asparagus, and caviar.
A few of the next courses ‘Foods That Are Leaving Us’ were not nearly as nice as the first courses. They were supposed to represent dishes the chef ate as a child, but now the ingredients are difficult to find. Unfortunately, they were pretty disgusting in taste. Quite a few of them could accurately be described as both ‘slimy’ and ‘sour.’ Such as the very watery and bitter raspadilla – a vegetable ice with syrups, fruits, and herbs in it. A really miserable mix of favors. Another miss was the delicia apple ceviche dish, which contained leche de tigre of rocato, sea urchin, and a purple flower called starflower or borage. This dish was super slimy and not appealing at all – and consuming it really made us question any awards Astrid y Gaston might have won. As well, delicia apples are actually a new (mutated in 2001 in France) mutation of gala apples – not something that would have existed in the chef’s youth. Not sure why they are trying to bullshit their customers… oh yeah, that’s right. For $150+ USD per person, per tasting menu.
One exception to these gross courses was an avocado dish which had cool green avocado slices, white sesame seeds, green onions, aji limon pepper, maca root, and candied lemon slices. This dish was supposed to be part of the ‘foods that are leaving us’ section of the menu, made with a type of avocado that people don’t use anymore. We tried to ask the waitress if the dish was actually made with the rare avocado, but she seemed very shady in her answer. When I did some research online I couldn’t seem to find this ‘rare’ avocado type (punta avocado?) anywhere – does anyone know about avocados out there?
The next dish contained fake pink clams made of a fruit known as ‘ice-cream fruit’ called pacae, along with spicy seafood broth, potatoes, and fava beans. This one was quite rich in its broth and while I didn’t mind it, (though I definitely didn’t find it spectacular either) Colin didn’t enjoy the taste. The black paint marks you see on the dish are painted with squid ink. I’ve enjoyed squid ink before in fantastic pasta at a place called Ninja in New York City… their food was much better than the Astrid y Gaston mixed mess our meal was progressing into.
This was followed by a shrimp ocopa dish containing shrimp tails and essence oil, roasted peanuts, garlic, garlic roasted onion broth, mirasol pepper, nuts, and a Peruvian black mint (a type of marigold) called huacatay. The shrimp tasted nice, but it was difficult to get the full flavor under the mess of a sauce they put on top of it. Finally we had a very simple-looking pink dish called an escabeche of cojinova, also known as amberjack fish. The fish is marinated with onions, tomatoes, and aji pepper. It was nothing special, just more liquid, sour sauce, and slime.
It was so disappointing to have these dishes after the meal started out so well with some tasty ones!
The following course, “Going Back Home,” was so basic Colin mentioned that if people didn’t like the previous few courses, they’d like the egg cause you can’t really mess up a simple egg and mashed potatoes! This dish had chaulina potato cream, chicken jus, dried tomatoes and porcini, fried quail eggs, tomato powder, and spinach. This one was much nicer than the previous dishes. The egg was followed by a beef tongue and potatoes dish with onions, roasted yellow aji pepper, and cream cheese, which again was somewhat of an improvement. You can’t really go wrong with potatoes and cream cheese – at least with a cheese lover like me.
Our next dish was rabbit and its livers, corn and garlic cream, oca, and olluco potatoes. I’ve had rabbit before, and this wasn’t the greatest version. I did somewhat enjoy the “Homage to Shambar” brisket meat, which was in a pork rib broth and decorated with bean germs and peppermint sprouts – but it was covered in aji. Unfortunately while the meat and components of these dishes themselves were ok, the overall dishes weren’t spectacular because they were all coated in orange aji sauce. While interesting the first time, and definitely Peruvian, coating everything with the same sauce really masks the flavors and spoils the overall dish. Try to innovate a bit more cleverly, Astrid y Gaston!
Now came the dessert part of the menu, which consisted of super small bites. This course was supposed to represent food items the chef ‘snuck’ around as a child trying to grab from the kitchen. Banana and cheese was first, which was a tiny piece of isla banana, caramel and pisco, crumbs of Paria cheese, arugula, and black pepper. This dish came with a foam on the side which totally could have been left out (I’m not a fan of foam food, unless it is cotton candy, it always tastes gross.) The next few desserts (which Colin called ‘safety dishes’ again) were nice bites – a pomegranate ‘bomb’ covered in pop rocks that left a nice crackle in the mouth, followed by a strawberry covered in condensed milk. There was one bite which wasn’t so great – an homage to mazamora morada and arroz con leche – basically a rice pudding served with a jelly made from a maize. This maize contains anthocyanins which give it a purple color.
Continuing with the sweet dishes, there came a sweet and refreshingly nice apricot dish which had apricots cooked with chamomile, almond cake, and apricot kernel ice-cream. There was next a version of a ‘King Kong,’ which is a rather large and dry crumbling cookie which I’ve found pretty nasty when I tried the original. This one had quince compote, peanut jelly, herb soup, and flower ice-cream. This dish was an improvement on the typical King Kong cookie, that is for sure! And I liked the decoration on the dish, the way it was put together was cartoon-like and funny.
The final dish was a chocolate bite served along with a peanut cocada (a coconut-containing sweet.) A final drink we had was an emollient in two temperatures. The drink is a herbal tea we’ve seen before being sold by corner street vendors, and it was prepared in this case as half hot, and half cold – divided by a leaf in the middle to form two separate colors of the drink. It was really interesting to watch the drink being made, and it reminded me of the ‘meeting of the waters’ we witnessed in the Amazon river. The taste however, was really not our thing – it was thick and syrup-like on the hot side, and quite slimy on the cold side.
While there were some really nice little bites on the Astrid y Gaston tasting menu we experienced, we found many of the dishes to be way too focused on presentation, and not at all on taste or flavor. Moreover, there was not a single person at A&G for the tasting menu who was not a foreign traveler – clearly this place is all hype from visitors, who unfortunately are probably too impressed by the visual fanfare to give the restaurant a critical review from what I can see on TripAdvisor. We experienced a couple great dishes, a few average dishes, and many very below-par dishes that were downright nasty. While the service was good at the start of the meal, that went straight downhill as well as the waitress didn’t bother to explain many of the dishes and couldn’t answer our questions regarding the different products the dishes contained or the rational behind why the dishes were being presented.
At the end of it all, Astrid y Gaston tried to overcharge us $40 USD per person on the tasting menu, and added on to the bill more than $20 USD worth of water we supposedly consumed (from a shared bottle being poured out to multiple tables of guests) - which they hadn’t given us prices for, or told us we would be charged for, when they offered it to us during the meal. Astrid y Gaston: Not great food, not great service, deeply overpriced and overhyped. To top it all off, at the end of the meal we were still hungry, but felt that after spending hundreds of dollars on one meal we couldn’t go grab something real to eat. Will not return!
The following day we visited the Larco Museum and its’ private collection on October 3. The most famous section of this museum was the erotic pottery collection. These pieces were mostly Chimu, and high quality... and very explicit! Some of the pieces included images of the dead in sexual positions, which indicates that the Chimu likely believed their future selves could continue to have relationships after death.
The main section of the Larco museum started with a display of stone heads called the Tenon Heads. Along with the heads there was an interesting description of how Larco invented a dating system for archeological ruins by using his knowledge of when the El Nino rains come every 18 to 25 years to Peru. This highly accurate system tells us the dates on different ruins and pieces around Peru. Many of the images and pieces had a combination of human and feline features on them as the important animals from the cultures within Peru’s territory were the serpent (representing the water/underworld,) the feline (representing the earth/present,) and the condor or other birds of prey (representing the air/heavens.) And interesting combination of these animals in shown in a piece from the Viru culture below.
There was a stone piece in the collection which shows a depiction of a female anthropomorphic deity with ‘vagina dentata’ between her legs. This stone slab also shows the classic union of feline, bird, and serpent through other animal features in the artwork on the goddess.
In some of the last rooms we encountered stunning Chimu gold pieces which had been buried with the great leader of Chan Chan, capital of the Chimu kingdom. The breastplate supposedly represents feathers of birds – the only animal able to get close to the sun, the group’s god. On the earrings are images of the leader, in one holding a decapitated head to show his power. In other images the leader is shown with feline features for the same reason.
On October 4 we headed back into the Plaza de Armas to see some more sites around the city center. We started by ducking into a couple churches, then ended up touring some excavated ruins just off the main square. The area of these ruins, called the ‘Casa Bodega y Quadra,’ was occupied from the time of the Spanish until just a few years ago when the original structure was fully uncovered. The museum explained the center of Lima’s classic grid-pattern layout, and how many of the conquering political and religious leaders received prime spots along it. The Colonial-era Lima house had arches made of large mud bricks along with a pebble flooring in areas and a wooden flooring in other areas. The far side of the house had a floodwall built to keep back the waters of the Rio Rimac, which was closer to the house in Colonial times.
At the ruins some pre-Hispanic pottery, including Chancay and Incan-style pieces, have been found. Along with this there were animal bones found, as there was a slaughterhouse in the area, and Chinese pottery, showing the wealth of the Spanish occupants. Some popular imported tin-glazed Panama polychrome pottery pieces were found as well. These pots could be knock offs of the popular imports, as evidenced by an additional find of items to create the pottery, such as glazing tools.
Next, since, we had heard that the changing of the guard was interesting (as it was in some parts quite funny,) we headed to grab a good spot to watch it happen in front of the government buildings of the Plaza.
We eventually made it to a former ‘torture center,’ where there was no English information, and no interested attendants. This ‘Museum of the Inquisition’ had some beautiful tiles and an interesting underground passageway with a few wax figures in torture positions. This building was the headquarters of the horrible Catholic torturers known as ‘Inquisition officials’ who subjected people to accusations of witchcraft and blasphemy from the late 1500’s to the early 1800’s. On one wall there was a drawing from Colonial times which showed the public gathered around, awaiting another execution in the city center. A grim history. We had seen enough – and left for something a little more uplifting: dinner!
Before I knew it we were on a plane and off to the jungle again. I’ll let Colin tell you all about Iquitos.
Francesca
No comments:
Post a Comment