Week 2

Cusco likes “7”. The flower-lined staircase that our AirBNB looks down on is named “Calle 7 Borreguitos” (“Street of 7 Little Lambs”). Nearby is “Calle 7 Diablitos” (“…Little Devils”), and there are five others around the city for a total of…7. More-recently, the city’s flag was designed with 7 rainbow stripes. And the brewery we visited twice is “7 Vidas” (maybe we should have visited 7 times?) So it feels like more than coincidence that our 7th wedding anniversary fell during our stay in this city. Especially since we were too busy on our actual wedding day to celebrate, so we delayed a day until October…7th.

If it hadn’t already been abundantly clear that Cusco is the foreign-tourist capital of Peru, Google Maps would have proven it. In most towns where we’ve looked for places to eat, many of the restaurants don’t even have a marker on Google, much less any reviews. But here in Cusco, many of the restaurants have thousands of reviews, far more than most places even in the US. And there are many places with very high ratings (4.8-4.9), which is hard to do with that many reviews. So we clearly would have had no problem finding a high-quality meal for our anniversary dinner. But most of them just seemed like “well-executed classed-up Peruvian food”, and nothing whose memory would last nearly as long as the US$2 dinners we’ve gotten from small-town street vendors, or the guinea pig dinner that a family cooked up exclusively for hungry and helpless gringos in Quichas.

With further digging I found an “omakase” experience, offering up to a 14-course tasting menu of Japanese/Peruvian fusion, and a restaurant in one of the museums that does a 5- to 7-course experience. But (unusually), neither even listed their prices on their menus, and digging through reviews suggested that they positioned themselves in the “American” tier, like some hotels in the tourist areas that charge US$200/night, even though US$30 can get you a quality place: they know that a subset of tourists will see a $30 room or a $20 meal and simply disbelieve that quality is possible at the price level, and instead choose a place because of the high price. For someone just-arrived to Peru, I actually can’t fault that strategy, but us going that route would disrespect all the experience we have acquired during our lengthy journey through this wonderful country.

So while I was looking at the reservation platform that those high-end places both use (mesa247.pe, also a good way to learn prices since some places have you select your “experience” as part of the booking), I noticed a new place hadn’t reached the surface during all my searches on Google Maps. Perhaps it was because it had opened less than three months ago, and had “only” ~50 reviews. But literally every review was 5-stars, and clearly none were created by bots or incentivized influencers.

Efimero (“Ephemeral”, even their name is good!) is accessed off a public internal courtyard of one of the colonial buildings (an enchanting aspect of historic Cusco’s urban design that we also loved in Ayacucho). We sat at the “bar”, because, like at the rejected omakase place, interacting with the chef(s) as they create your food, and observing their techniques and precision, is part of the experience. Our “waitress” was really more our guide and translator; while we felt slightly-ashamed that we couldn’t fully-understand the chef’s Spanish descriptions of his creations, it was actually really helpful for our skills to listen to his Spanish and then get an English translation.

My first bite of our smoked alpaca tartare proved the value of our chef’s multiple tastes off the back of his hand as he spiced and salted the meat while assembling the dish. My tongue was blessed with a deep, balanced richness that it’s only experienced a handful of times, like at family holiday dinners at some of the finest restaurants in Portland, Oregon. In addition to alpaca, the dish included a coca-leaf emulsion, and gelatinous balls of “murmunta”, a cyanobacteria(!) that grows in Andean lagoons. So while the construction emulated a fine-dining experience from the US or Europe, the ingredients remained deeply Peruvian. Efimero must be one of the only places in the world creating such a fusion at this high level, and it was a perfect way to recall some of our high-end dining experiences from the early part of our relationship, now viewed through the lens of our life together in Peru.

Our next five courses brilliantly continued the theme. The lamb was topped with potato foam and flavored with chicha de jora, a fermented-corn drink frequently poured by the glass from a plastic 2L bottle by rural women at tiny roadside stands. The beef, formed in a drumstick around a twine-wrapped twig and cooked over leaping flames, was given that handle so that it could be dipped in a pot of uchucuta, a Peruvian sauce built from rocoto peppers. The octopus was topped with chalaca, a salsa from an appropriately-coastal region of Peru. The trout, covered with a hat of crunchy tempura breading and citrus foam, somehow included an Andean fruit called “tumbo”. And the dairy poured into the citrus dessert (so much better than when stubborn 8-year-old me poured my orange juice into my Cheerios) was “tres leches”, a combination of evaporated, condensed, and whole milk, all of which can frequently be found in cans in even the smallest Peruvian bodega. Even the cocktails used Salqa, fermented sugar cane from the distillery we visited in Ollantaytambo!

It was the best meal we’ve had in at least the last five years, and maybe even our entire 7-year marriage! In retrospect we should have chosen seven dishes from the menu of twelve, but the six we shared left us more than full. Adding cocktails and wine unsurprisingly made it the most-expensive meal we’ve eaten in Peru, which honestly was sort of the goal. But it converted to a shockingly-low US$106! In Chicago, at four times the price, you would need to reserve a month out to get a table. But it actually wouldn’t be possible for any price, because where are they going to source alpaca, coca leaves, and chicha de jora in Chicago?! It will likely take many more wedding anniversaries before we equal this experience in Cusco, but I’ll be glad to mark each new year with my wife even if we “fail”.

We had one more Inca site visit left in us, though Qorikancha is actually more of a cultural combination/appropriation/destruction, similar to Jewish/Christian/Muslim sites in the Middle East, or Hindu/Muslim sites in India. A 17th-century Catholic church sits atop the Inca foundations, and a secular modern museum now wraps around the entirety. Of course with successful-if-unintentional elimination of the Inca culture, significantly less tension is wrapped around Qorikancha.