Now there’s a real walk – roughly 15 km for the day.
Started out heading down to Barranco, a neighborhood that’s a favorite, and one I’ve wandered a bit on past visits. There’s even a lovely little video I put together here. As is typical in the mornings here, Lima is quite foggy. Love the sign for when they close off the road down to the sea level highway because of tsunami warnings….
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I was headed for a start of day breakfast at the much recommended Pan Sal Aire (Bread Salt Air). Not exactly Peruvian cooking, but I ordered up an iced tea (hmmm, lapsang souchang with orange and basil, very interesting), and an avocado toast. Now, I missed the whole avocado toast craze in New York (and elsewhere), but based on photos I’ve seen, usually the avocado goes on the toast, not next to it. But I moved it, mashed it, and it’s topped with shavings of cured egg yolks. Excellent way to start the day, especially for 20 soles including tip, roughly $6.
Then I headed into Surco, the next neighborhood to the east, certainly a bit more rundown than Barranco….
…where I was headed to the Mercado Surco (in common parlance, officially it’s the Mercado Jorge Chavez). This is “the” spot in Lima for things from the selva, the jungle, up there in the Amazon. It’s got all the usual stuff too, but this is definitely where folk from that region come to buy ingredients that they miss. And eat fare from up that way too at one of the many food stands. Or stand around trying to decide just exactly which type of tripe they want to buy.
Food always being a driving force in my wanders, I headed to one of those huariques I was talking about yesterday. This one, Brisas de Uyacali, just across from the front entrance of the market, has a reputation for some of the best Amazonian traditional food in the area, and particularly their tacacho con cecina. A tacacho is a big ball of mashed, roasted plantain, with bits of air-dried, seasoned pork in it, the cecina, and in this version, with a nice slab of the same grilled up to accompany it. I don’t really need that much starch, but I made it through the fantastic cecina and about half the tacacho. Accompanied by a fiery salsa of charapita chilies and cocona, a fruit from the Amazon that tastes like a tomato and a lemon had a baby. A steal at 20 soles including beverage and tip, or about $6.
The beaches of Lima aren’t exactly the prettiest spots. They’re mostly gravel, even the sandy areas have a lot of gravel mixed in. They’re basically just a small strip of land between the highway and the water. Oh, and they don’t make it easy to get there – there are almost no crosswalks (there’s one at the base of the hill coming down from the Puente de Suspiros, the bridge of sighs, in Barranco, and another one a couple of miles north in Miraflores. You just run across the highway when there’s a big enough gap between cars. And several sections of the beach are blocked off to people entering because of “sharp metal objects” and the like. Doesn’t stop people from coming down and sitting on the beach looking out at the water. And, there are surfers.
A few kilometers north and I braved crossing back over the highway. The fog was pretty much burning off by this point…
…In fact, I ended up back at the point where I took that foggy photo above. See the difference a few hours makes?
Then it was on to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, where three salons are offering up an exhibition each. the first was a sort of interactive video of an apartment complex in Caracas, Venezuela, not really photograph-able, the second, and most interesting, a series of beautiful photos of transsexual and transgender women, posed in gorgeous clothing and/or settings, and a few nudes. Fascinating.
And, it wouldn’t be a Latin American art museum without some sort of political, anti-government exhibition. But come on, is that second one really art? It’s empty Plexiglas boxes….
Having just prior to the museum clambered laboriously up the cliff into the north part of Barranco, I wasn’t about to go back down just to continue along the beaches of Miraflores. Instead, I walked along the road that edges the cliff, the Costa Verde. It’s pretty. Lots of greenery. Parks. The usual.
I had trouble imagining that Miraflores, pretty much the wealthiest part of town, really has any huariques, but there are a decent number of them touted out there. And while they’re certainly upscale from the holes in the walls in many other neighborhoods, they do kind of fit. Lobo de Mar Otani, I was told, can do no wrong when it comes to camarones, shrimp. Unfortunately, they had to do wrong, because shrimp fishing is currently under government interdiction for the months of March and April (come on, it was February 28th… I still had time). But they offered to make any of their shrimp dishes with langostinos, prawns, and I went with the highly recommended picante de langostinos. Despite asking me, of course, if I wanted it “regular” or “mild”, and me asking for “extra” spicy, they brought it at regular. I just added most of the ajicito, the chili puree, that was on the table. I’d say this was probably the best aji sauce I’ve had for shrimp, or prawns, so maybe it’s true, they can do no wrong. 50 soles, about $17 is a little more than your typical huarique, but not bad for the quality.
Okay, this one stepped completely outside of any of my plans for this visit to Lima. On seeing that I was here, my friend Max, back in BA, who is a bit of a grill and smoke master (down at the bottom of this post), started sending me messages that I simply had to visit his dear friend Estéfano at his new smokehouse and barbecue joint, the first norteamericano style BBQ spot in Lima. And before I’d responded, he’d already contacted Estéfano to make sure that I’d be well taken care of. And given that the place is three blocks from my hotel, I couldn’t avoid it or even come up with a decent excuse.
So late afternoon I dropped in and introduced myself, and, not surprisingly, Estéfano insisted I try a little of several things on this menu and report back to Max my thoughts (they’ve never actually met, it’s an online friendship with a bit of mentoring going on from Max’s side helping him get going). The platter he arrived with is a half of the bandeja personal, the supposed individual sized bbq platter, so imagine this with double of each of the four meats, plus bread and french fries. Excellent brisket, rocking good chorizo, good spareribs (the sauce was too sweet for me, I wish they’d used the spicier sauce of the two), and pulled pork. I did not eat all of this, I simply couldn’t, plus I still had dinner to come. But I gamely made it through about half, then took a tour of the kitchen and saw the huge smoker they’ve got built right in. This meal was on the house. But that doesn’t change that I’d happily recommend it to anyone Lima who wants to try good smoked BBQ.
In the end, I just couldn’t face dinner, and ended up grabbing a large yogurt from a convenience store down the block and stayed in watching Netflix. A much needed break for my stomach.
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