Superba bar

Long known for its cocktails and sandwiches prepared with house-made ham, the Superba has been one of Lima's favorite "old-school" haunts since its opening in 1938. (As for the name, many believe that it was originally "Superbar" and that the final "r" was dropped, but it has actually always been just "Superba".)

A couple of years ago, the original owner retired, and passed the management to his children. They've kept the place intact, while quietly turning it into one Lima's best spots for craft beer. 

A sign on the bar states that they have 90 beers on hand , but the staff told me it is more than that.  All of them are bottled (draught beer is not very common here yet), and while they may have a cooler in back somewhere, it looks like most are just kept on the shelves or counters at room temperature.

The beer geek draw however, is the couple of display fridges in the dining room, both of which are well-stocked with a pick of imported (mostly Belgian and Spanish) beers, and lots of Peruvian craft beers.

Just in the one, I counted beers from Cumbres, Sierra Andina, Beer Stache, Nuevo Mundo, Invictus, and a few others.

If one is in need of a good beer in the Limce/San Isidro area, the Superba is a go-to spot.  Their traditional Peruvian mixed drinks are good as well, as are their sandwiches, of course.

Lunch at Central

 

Last week, Liz and I had the opportunity to lunch at Central restaurant, here in Lima's Miraflores district.

Central has been one of the up-and-coming star restaurants on the Lima food scene, and we had been curious about it for some time as it kept getting consistently good reviews.   It also happened that at about the time we made our reservation a month ago, Central was ranked in fourth place among the world's 50 best restaurants on the 2015 edition of the prestigious San Pellegrino World's 50 Best list, and No.1 among Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants. 

Liz and I opted for experiencing what Central has become best known for, which is their 17-course Mater Alturas tasting menu.

The ingredients for each course of the Mater Alturas menu (as well as of the smaller Mater Ecosistemas menu) are sourced at specific elevations in Peru, ranging from 70 feet under the sea to almost 14,000 feet up in the Andes. Those ingredients are put together in ways that don't resemble any typical Peruvian foods, but are innovative and, actually, quite tasty ... and beautiful.

Here are some of them, in no particular order:

Seafood crisp with seafood cream and seaweed.

Corn several ways (and in several varieties): paste, crisp, and soup.

Cauliflower with crisps and flowers.

Herb bread served over smoking coca leaves.

Razor clams with pepino melon and citrus.

Ayrampo and pommegranate extract.

Doncella (an Amazonian fish) with nut cream and jungle fruit.

Octopus, sea snail, and octopus ink foam.

An intense octopus broth.

Calf steak covered in quinua colored with herbs and cactus, with an Andean herb-infused cream.

Chocolate ice cream with flakes of lucuma and chaco, an edible clay.

Fruit sorbet, with ayrampo-tinted fruits chunks.

Cacao fruit extract in reverse-osmosis water, with kiwicha jellies.

Chicken with a hollandaise sauce and moraya pearls and cushuro.  Moraya is an Andean tuber and cushuro is a sort of cyanobacterial colony that forms small green balls in the wet ground around high Andean lakes.

From top to bottom: ayrampo crisp, avocado cream, algarrobina cream.

Besides the quality and innovation in the preparations, one detail that was impressive was that in many instances it wasn't just the dishes for one course that hit our table but actually the regular dish and one or more glutten-free or dairy-free dishes for Liz whenever the regular dish contained gluten or dairy.  In effect, we were each served a similar but still different 17-course menu!

Central

Santa Isabel 376

Miraflores, Lima

Peru

centralrestaurante.com.pe

Jiron Quilca

This afternoon I headed back downtown, again to Jiron Quilca.

Quilca is a street that stands out in several ways.   One that is not very obvious from the ground -although it could become evident with a bit of thought- is that it does not conform to the grid pattern of downtown Lima, but rather comes off of Plaza San Martin at an agle.

In the photo below, Jiron Quilca can be appreciated in the foreground, approaching the plaza at an angle rather at odds with the regularity of the surrounding streets.

Photo: skyscrapercity.com

When Francisco Pizarro traced the layout for dowtown Lima, he followed the "damero" (checkerboard) pattern of manzanas (city blocks) separated by streets criss-crossing at right angles.  This pattern is repeated throughout Spanish America and is the reason that the core of downtown is sometimes referred to as the Damero de Pizarro.   Quilca, however, notably breaks that pattern, appearing almost as a gash in the city in the image above.

The story is that Quilca follows the path of an Inca road into the city, and that at the triangular plaza at the what is today the intersection of Quilca and Av. Garcilazo de la Vega (aka Av. Wilson) there was once a tambo, or Inca way station.

Quilca is also noted as a center of Lima's bohemian life.   For one thing, the stretch immediately contiguous to Plaza San Martin is lined with dive restaurants that come alive with at nightfall and spend the days sleepily puttering along, smelling of stale beer.

Quilca is, more meritoriously, also home to the Queirolo tavern, which was established in 1920 by relatives of the Queirolo wine and pisco-making family that owns the Santiago Queirolo distillery and Antigua Taberna Queirolo in Pueblo Libre.

The Queirolo, with its unchanged decor, is counted as one of Lima's classic bars and old-school eateries, and it fills up at lunch and in the evenings.

Quilca is also a locus of a more modern, youthful bohemian crowd, which tends toward the metal and punk "underground" scene.  Much of which is centered -spiritually, if no longer physically- on the El Averno cultural center.

The center, which housed gigs and promoted the arts in general, was a vibrant presence in Lima's "alternative" scene for more than a decade, but also a constant object of police interest, who regarded it as a locus of "delinquency", and as attracting "bad elements" and "pot smokers" (OK, so maybe that last one was true! LOL).  But, maybe even more than that, it was the fear instilled in institutional and bureaucratic conservatism by what is new, free, and transgressive.

The center was raided it on a number of occasions, with the cops -and on two occasions, hired thugs- tearing the doors out of their frames, looting the place, and sometimes violently attacking the young people they found inside. 

El Averno shut its doors for perhaps the last time last October, after losing an appeal against a municipal eviction order, but its building remains, vibrantly and wonderfully defiant.

And even though El Averno is closed, Quilca's punk and metal scene has hardly faded away, as tucked away among the many used bookstores that line the street, there are small shops selling CDs, DVDs, fanzines, and anarchist newspapers, and which serve as clearinghouses -as do the very walls of Quilca's buildings- of information on concerts and new releases.

Pisco

On the morning of August 1st, a few hours before my cousin Hernan's wedding -for which we had journeyed to Ica, and at which I was to stand as witness- a few of us took the opportunity to visit Bodega Vista Alegre to learn a bit about how pisco is made.

Vista Alegre, manufacturer of Sol de Ica piscos and a number of wines, is one of the largest and oldest vineyards in the country, having been founded in the 1850s, and is one of the most modern in terms of equipment.

Peru can lay claim to having the oldest vinicultural history in South America, the Spanish having brought grape vine cuttings from Europe and established the first vineyards -in Ayacucho, it so happens- in the 1550s. Saddly, Peruvians cannot lay claim to a history of great wines, but when it comes to distilling fermented grape must they've certainly learned their craft well!

Pisco has been produced in Peru since at least the early 1600s, and received a boost in the 1640s when wine exports from the Viceroyalty of Peru were banned in order to protect the interests of Spanish wineries. The ban caused wine production to whither, but pisco production continued and expanded as its sales were not legally affected and it was not as perishable as wine.

The process of pisco production starts very much like that of wine. In March, the grapes are picked and brought to a large vat, the lagar, where they will be squeezed, and the skins and juice separated from the seeds and stems which would lend bitterness to the drink. In the old days, and in some artisanal bodegas today, the grapes would be stepped on to extract the juice but in larger operations -such as Vista Alegre's- a press would be used.

Today, Vista Alegre uses a mechanical press to accomplish this task. The must is then transfered to fermentation tanks, where naturally-occurring yeasts on the grapes transform the grape sugars into alcohol, carbon dioxide, and other compounds.

The fermented must -now, I suppose, actually wine- is then transferred to large pot stills (alambiques) where the liquid is heated and its elements separated from one another through evaporation and condensation. As the fermented must is heated, the more volatile compounds evaporate out and rise through the "swan neck" (cuello de cisne) into a condensing chamber, from whence it is sent through a coil (serpentina) immersed in water, which cools it down.

The distiller's craft and knowledge truly come into play at this point as s/he must discard the initial toxic methanol-laden runoff (the "head" or cabeza), judge when the sufficient alcohol level -usually around 42%- has been reached in the main portion of the distillate (the "body" or cuerpo), while keeping it separate from the "tail" (cola) which could introduce off flavors.

The pisco is then aged in a nonreactive container, which must not affect its appearance or character in any way. At some small bodegas the old pisco amphorae are still used, but at industrial scale operations, such as Vista Alegre's, vessels of stainless steel or food-grade plastic are preferred nowadays. Vista Alegre keeps its old ceramic pisco vessels around as a decorative and historical element.

After no less than three months, the pisco is tested, bottled, labeled, and sent out to the consumer.

After the tour, which was really quite interesting, we were conducted to a room near the entrance to sample some of the wines and piscos produced there.

The wines were OK but, like many Peruvian wines, tended toward the sweet and lacked a bit of body. We did, however, enjoy one of the red ones enough to buy a bottle.

We also liked the Sol de Ica acholado (mixed) pisco and my dad and I each purchased a bottle. Along with mine, I also bought one of only 5 remaining in stock out of 50,000 numbered bottles (mine is # 012654) of a special pisco produced in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World .

Afterward, we headed to the weirdness that is Bodega Lazo in search of a pisco vessel to buy, only to be flatly turned down by the owner, and thence, in a rush, back to the hotel to change for the wedding.

Antigua Taberna Queirolo

Mom and Dad in front of the Taberna Queirolo

Around the corner from the Archaeological Museum is the Antigua Taberna Queirolo. In the 1880s an Italian immigrant settled in the area and established a winery and distillery on this spot. As part of his businness he opened a general store, which also served as an outlet for his wines and spirits. Eventually, the store turned into a restaurant and bar, serving the wines and piscos made in the factory right behind the shop.



Today, Queirolo piscos are some of the best-regarded in the country and the Taberna Queirolo ranks among the most picturesque and "classic" eateries and watering holes in the city. Their pork sandwiches are well-spoken of and certainly look good. Even though we were still full from lunch, our mouths started to water as we watched the sandwiches being made behind the counter as we savoured our pisco sours, coffee and Inca Kola. With 127 years making pisco and putting out the sandwiches, they ought to know what they're doing, and must be doing it right!

Antigua Taberna Queirolo
1090 Avenida San Martín, corner of Avenida Vivanco
Pueblo Libre
Phone: 460-0441
http://antiguatabernaqueirolo.com