I heard Lima has amazing food including having the best restaurant in the world. So while we’re not “foodies”, we still enjoy good cuisine. Plus, its on the ocean AND we get to check out a new country. Win, win, win!
The hardest part about booking this leg of our South America trip, was trying to figure out which restaurant(s) to visit and how I was going to try all the things on my list. And I had quite the list: Lomo saltado, Ají de gallina, Tallarines verdes, Papa rellana, Chaufa, and more. Luckily I got a reservation at Panchita that checked off a few items, and a plan for the others!
We arrived in the morning after an early flight from Mendoza. It was maybe 9:30am, however, the folks at immigration seemed to be having their morning meeting and weren’t ready for us. One of them broke off to help us though, but it was funny as we were the only tourists in the whole immigration area.
Then we headed to our hotel, the AC Hotel Miraflores, which was maybe 45 minutes from the airport. Our room wasn’t quite ready, but luckily we didn’t have to wait very long. Upon getting to our oceanfront room, we were greeted by this amazing view:
I’m not joking. I was expecting this, however, as Lima is known for being overcast, but will also clear up throughout the day. 3 of our 4 mornings looked something like above, but later in the afternoon it looked like:
I was quite hungry so we just opted for lunch at the hotel. First up on my food checklist was lomo saltado which is beef strips sauteed with onions and soy sauce served over french fries. O.M.G. It was so good. Between us, we ate this 4 times in 3 days.
I think I laid low in the afternoon as I was tired from being up at 4:30am for our flight and I was still a little worn out from being sick.
That evening we had dinner reservations at Panchita. The first order of business – cocktails! I think mine was a pisco & passionfruit concoction. It was delicious.
For our appetizer, we got tequeños filled with Ají de gallina – chicken in a creamy, yellow sauce. They were so good! For our main dish, Chuck got lomo saltado, and I got chicken with Tallarines Verdes which is basically Peruvian pesto. It was delicious, and craveble.
Dessert was some meringue and lucuma dulce de leche which was a little odd, but still fun to try.
The next day we headed to Huaca Pucllana which was originally built in 200AD, but was frequently rebuilt until 700AD. You have to take a guided tour which gave us a lot of information about the site and the people who lived in the area at the time. We even got to go on top of it. And as if the site wasn’t cool enough, they had llamas, alpaca, and guinea pigs!
Then we had lunch at the attached restaurant overlooking the site. The food was pretty good too.
Then we spent some time wandering around the Miraflores neighborhood, specifically El Malecón, the scenic cliffside walkway that runs along Miraflores. Luckily the marine layer had lifted and we got some great views.
We were even lucky enough to get sunsets every night. There may have been a few trips to the rooftop bar to enjoy them too.
We literally had a bird’s eye view from up there 🙂
On our last day, we went to Tori Pollería which is from the head chef behind Maido, the best restaurant in the world. This was a casual restaurant known for Pollo ala Brasa and Chaufa, which is Peruvian fried rice.
Then we walked to Parque Kennedy, aka John F. Kennedy Park. It’s famous for its stray cat population although they’re taken care of by volunteer organizations. It was like an Easter Egg Hunt searching for cats all over.
Then we walked back to our hotel and later to the Barranco neighborhood:
Here are some other pics of our time:
This mall was right outside our hotel and had amazing views of the coastline.
And here is what our area looked like most mornings:
One day we had a paraglider buzzing right past our hotel room:
And that pretty much wrapped up our 2 week trip to South America. We really enjoyed the entire trip. And the food in Lima absolutely lived up the hype.
As a bonus, I got to see some of the Panama Canal while flying into Panama on the way home.
