How a remote Peruvian restaurant 12,000ft above sea level is conquering the culinary world

With one restaurant already in fifth place on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, Mil’s chef-patron Virgilio Martinez is now chronicling and reviving ancient local ingredients and techniques that might otherwise be lost with time

Martinez in his Lima restaurant Central: in the new venture, it’s not just the cuisine that’s elevated (Reuters)

Taking destination dining to new heights, a celebrated Peruvian chef has just hung up his apron 11,706 feet above sea level, where the entirety of his street address is “ascending 500 metres from the Archaeological Complex of Moray”.

Yet despite the enigmatic coordinates, and the fact that the nearest villages are all but concealed from the outside world, every taxista within a 100-mile radius will soon know these back roads by heart.

There is, after all, no concealing the resident chef: Virgilio Martinez, who also runs Central, the nine-year-old Lima institution that ranks fifth on the closely watched World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. While unassuming in the extreme, Martinez, 40, has already left a distinct footprint with his new Andean outpost, Mil, which opened at the end of February.

Having formed a co-op of sorts with the tiny nearby farming communities of Kacllaraccay and Mullaka’s-Misminay, he’s aiming to chronicle and revive ancient local ingredients and food practices that might otherwise be lost to time.

Among others in his merry band of preservationists are his wife, Pia Leon, an acclaimed chef in her own right; his sister Malena Martinez, head of the group’s native ingredient-catalogueing operation and Francesco D’Angelo Piaggio, the staff anthropologist and community outreach adviser who has the best backstory of the bunch: when he was still working on his thesis in a nearby rural community, his mother saw the Virgilio Martinez episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix and insisted her son do the same, given the gentlemen’s eerily simpatico sensibilities. A job at Mil soon followed.

Martinez dresses a plate in his restaurant in Lima (AFP/Getty)

The result of the group’s efforts is unlike anything else in my restaurant-going experience. Lunch (there is no dinner service as of yet) consisted of eight courses; a gustatory grand tour of altitudinous ecosystems, each stop an opportunity to use age-old ingredients and techniques to arrestingly modern effect.

Our first “moment” (as they call courses at Mil) was entitled Preservation, a nod to the local practice of preserving potatoes during the harvest. “The technique involves exposing potatoes to cold water flow, then sunlight, to freeze-dry them,” Malena Martinez explains. But rather than serve the resulting traditional chuño as is, her brother grates, rehydrates, cooks and once again dehydrates it, until an amazingly airy, diaphanous chip emerges, to be met with the accompanying uchucuta – a heady blend of herbs, chilli and corn.

Other standout moments included Andean Forest, “lupinus legumes” in an extra-bright tiger’s milk (citrus-based marinade); Diversity of Corn, the alternately creamy and crunchy components of which add up to something “like a muesli”; and Extreme Altitude, our intro to cushuro, or “colonies of bacterias” – palate-pleasing blue-green spheres plucked from Andean lake water.

The drink pairings were also deliciously high-concept, from a pampa anise-spiked smoked lettuce infusion to a citrusy kiwicha milk (we stuck with nonalcoholic because of the altitude).

Standing at the restaurant’s front door after the meal for one last look at the Inca ruins just outside, we could hardly disagree with Martinez’s assessment of his new neighbourhood: “For me, this is the best place to eat, to get ingredients – and to meet people.”