Gastón Acurio is Peru’s most famous chef and arguably the best-known Peruvian in the world. The son of a senator, Acurio went to study law in Madrid, Spain, but had a change of heart and went to Paris to Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. His first restaurant, Astrid y Gaston, was an instant success in Lima and it soon spurred satellite restaurants around Latin America and other chains based on the various types of Peruvian cuisine. The growth in popularity of Peruvian cuisine around the world in the past decade would not have been possible without him. Here is a list of Acurio’s vast restaurant empire around the world:

Peru’s north coast town of Chiclayo, about halfway between Lima and the border with Ecuador right on the Pan-American highway, is rich with archeological sites, beaches, and museums that make it a must on any trip in the north of the country.

While I travel often, this past year has seen me go to more places and cover more ground than ever before. I hit up nearly every major Latin American capital and even had a few unknown destinations like Montreal and Reykjavik. I tasted, sipped, saw, touched, and learned more in 2010 than any other year of my life. Here are my restaurant highlights:

Living in Peru is reporting (Living in Peru » News » World known cook Ferran Adrià to visit Peru in 2011) via Peru21 that Spanish chef Ferran Adrià of El Bulli will appear at Lima, Peru’s Mistura food festival in September of 2011. El Bulli is set to close for two… Read More →

A new phenomenon in Ecuador’s large cities, Quito and Guayaquil, has been the commercialization of small shops and street stands that sell Yogurt with Pan de Yuca (Yuca/Cassava bread). Several chains have expanded all over these cities and have turned the very simple snack into a sort of Starbuck’s convenience.

Steven Roll, who writes a great blog about Latin American travel, Travel Ojos, asked me a few months ago to contribute a short story in an ebook project he was working on called Celebrating Latin America at Ground Level. I’m happy to say that the free book has been released and it’s quite good.

Lima, Peru’s famed seafood restaurant La Rosa Nautica, which is set on a pier that extends a hundred meters from the city’s shore into the Pacific ocean, is opening its second restaurant in Bogota, Colombia.The restaurant should be open by mid-December 2010. They are also planning to open a third La Rosa Nautica franchise in Argentina.

Peru’s culinary boom has spread to more remote parts of the country and more Amazonian chefs are returning from cooking schools and high-end restaurants in Lima tot heir birthplace. Iquitos is the natural choice for the center of the Amazon’s new culinary boom: it has gone through several major booms and busts in the past century (rubber, oil, drug trade) where great wealth has come and gone that it is one of the Amazon’s more cosmopolitan cities. Pedro Miguel Schiaffino of Lima’s Malabar, one of the city’s great chefs and one of two South American chefs known for their explorations of Amazonian cuisine (Alex Atala in Sao Paolo is the other) has been actively involved in pushing local producers to produce premium products and encourage local chefs to look deeper.

In Montreal everyone has an opinion of their favorite delicatessen. I asked a cab driver late one night about Snowdon and without hesitation she said to go to Schwartz’s. Others I asked said the opposite. Each place smokes an estimated 10,000 pounds of meat per week. The practice of smoking meats dates to ancient times as a way of preserving it. Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Eastern Europe were well known for smoking meat in the 19th century and it has since been generally considered a trait of Jewish communities, particularly in North American delis.

Peru’s capital of the south of Arequipa, the country’s second largest city and an agricultural powerhouse, is part of an extremely gastronomically unique region. Arequpeñan cuisine is renowned the country over for its high quality prawns, rocoto peppers, cheeses, piscos, oilves and olive oils, beans, grains, and alpaca meat. The city is full of great restaurants and talented chefs, but it’s the San Camillo market that really grabs the pulse of the city. The sprawling market that sits just a few blocks from the Plaza de Armas is one of Peru’s most lively.