Peruvian

M Grill and M Raw are the new M Restaurants opened by the Bank station in the City area of London. The name clearly attracted my attention, and despite M Restaurants giving them only 1 M, I have given M Raw a few more. We actually came here on the first day of the restaurants opening, so it was a bit empty, but they did not have any obvious problems that restaurants can have when they first open, so they did a great job on this first day, and our waitress was very enthusiastic.

This is now my favourite Peruvian restaurant in London. Andina is located in Shoreditch, close to Shoreditch House, and serves Peruvian food focusing more on the food of Andes mountains (hence the name) which is different to the food that Peruvian restaurants like Ceviche and Koya serve and in my view more interesting. Ingredients like quinoa, maca, amaranth, cape gooseberry, purple maize and many more come from Andes and a lot of these you can see in Andina. Executive Chef at Andina is Tomasz Baranski. Andina is a sister restaurant to Ceviche, one of the first Peruvian restaurants that opened in London, in Soho, and I actually prefer Andina much more as I think the menu is broader, better executed and just more interesting.

As you probably know by now I love Peruvian food, so whenever a new Peruvian restaurant opens (this year there have been 4 opening!!) I always go there to try it out. So when I read that Coya, a Peruvian restaurant, on Picadilly, about 100m away from Hide Park Corner, had opened, I gathered some friends and arranged a dinner on a Saturday evening to go there. Coya has a formal restaurant, a lounge bar that serves the best of the restaurant food as well and also a private members lounge.

I have been waiting for months for this place to open and finally it has!!! Lima (also the capital of Peru, but I am sure you know this) is a Peruvian restaurant based in Fitzrovia, and London this year seems to have been overtaken by a craze for Peruvian food. First Ceviche opened in Soho and now Lima, and all the food blogs and magazines are writing about Peruvian food and restaurants these days. I went to Peru 2 months ago and absolutely loved the country and thought the food was excellent, and as I did not like the Soho restaurant Ceviche that much when I went there a few months ago, I was hoping that with the opening of Lima, there will now be a solid, good Peruvian restaurant in London. 

Chicha is another one of celebrity chef's Gaston Acurio's restaurants (the other one I have reviewed is Astrid y Gaston ranked the 35th best restaurant in the world). Chicha is located in Cusco, a historical city in Peru, and so serves Gaston's take on the local traditional Andean dishes, and whilst there is less buzz about this place than about Astrid y Gaston, I almost liked this place more, also because Chicha feels more intimate as a restaurant.  The name “Chicha” means a type of drink loved by the curacas and caciques in pre incan times, and today Chicha (and there are many varieties of the drink – purple, corn, peanut, etc) is drunk in several occasions, family reunions, patronal festivities and religious ceremonies.