Virgilio Martínez knows his next restaurant isn’t for everyone. It’s a journey to get to Mil, located near the Inca ruin of Moray above Cusco, Peru, and the food will be unfamiliar to most: The kitchen’s focus turns towards its surrounding Andean landscape and the techniques of the past.
“You have to be sensitive, creative, open-minded, and willing to experience something that is new,” the Chef’s Table star says of the 20 people he and his team will be serving six days a week starting on February 27. “Mil is not new like Central was. Here we talk about the unknown, in a very extreme way.”
The restaurant will highlight “ancestral cuisines” of the Andes and, like Central, the breakout Lima restaurant that landed Martínez on the World’s 50 Best List and in the international spotlight, it will have a menu inspired by the altitude at which ingredients grow. But where Central takes diners through different altitudes course by course, Mil is laser-focused on what can grow at the towering height of its own setting 11,500 feet above sea level.
“We are quite limited, even in a place where there’s a lot of biodiversity,” says Martínez. For example, the ocean is off-limits; instead, he and his team are sourcing fish from high-altitude lakes. Coffee, cacao, root vegetables, various meats and legumes, and Andean grains like quinoa, on the other hand, all pass muster. “We don’t just want to cook well and cook farm-to-table,” Martínez says. “It goes way beyond that.”
While the multi-course meal will unfold during the day, it feels off to call it “lunch.” Starting service at 1 p.m. allows guests to explore the grounds and take in the breathtaking sight of the Moray, terraced Inca ruins where the chef was first inspired to think of cooking based on altitude. To put it simply: “At night you can’t see the crops, the fields, or the view.”
The view is very much a part of the restaurant’s story. The dining room windows look directly out to the historic site, while on the plate, dishes highlight the culinary history of the mountains. “The way we’re conceptualizing the whole thing is trying to give the diner a sense of time and place and people and view and landscape and produce,” Martínez says.
Mil will also reveal more about the restaurant group’s culinary research arm. Mater Iniciativa’s Cusco home base at Mil has in many ways been the catalyst for the project. The team, led by Malena Martínez, has been working with biologists, botanists, and an anthropologist to learn more about Andean food culture and science. As Mater Iniciativa continues its work, the plan is to invite students and researchers from around the world to learn alongside the team, as well as continue to host events that bring together chefs and specialists.
It’s plenty to keep Virgilio Martínez busy, but that’s not all he has in store. He and Pia León, his wife and co-chef at Central, are in process of opening a new restaurant called Kjolle in Lima — and reinventing Central. Both projects are still very much in process, but Martínez thinks they’ll materialize in June.
The Food
“As the menu keeps changing we will be showing [more],” Martínez says of an early menu sneak peek. “But there is a lot of intuition and sense of place in the Andes regions. [We also have] a strong commitment to work with our neighbors who are the best producers for what we do.” Take a look below as Martínez walks through some early dishes:
Spirits and high-altitude infusions
The drink directly above is an “infusion of Andean passionfruit with big limes, and molle pink pepper, with a corn spirit,” according to Martínez. “They are part of the pairing: two cocktails; one high altitude wine; one fermented corn (chicha); two different beers made by cervecerias andinas [Andean beer makers]; and one glass of fermented oca root and some hot alcoholic drinks made with wood — that’s a bit of a surprise.”
“Diversity of corn”
“We are extracting most of the taste and the textures of corn that we are growing in almost two hectares we have,” Martínez says. In this dish, “you see different textures, colors and preparations: a bit of tradition, a bit of innovation. Many of the plates depend on what we harvest that day, otherwise we will be changing preparations and produce. You see something like tamales, and some tiny and thin crisps, smoked with the husks; all the colors are coming from the natural colors in the vegetables.”
Andean pork and lupinis
Here, “pork belly is confited in its own fat in a wood oven,” Martínez says. “We use some petals of retama flowers and legumes, creamed with different wild plants from the mountains.”
Alpaca and freeze-dried tubers
In this dish, “the alpaca is braised and then seared with its own fat, we use the tuntas (freeze-dried potatoes) we get in the altiplano, the plateo, and we serve it with special quinoa taken by hand from the same plateau,” he says. “We use most of the leaves and petals that grow almost everywhere in certain seasons: wild huacatays and wild plants are easy to find, and we are working with the ones that have been approved by Mater Iniciativa.”
Sweet huatia
“Huatia [a traditional local oven] is a way to cook potatoes, tubers, and roots underground with ashes of the soil and the wood that heats the soil,” Martínez says. “We make an oven with soil, hot rocks, and clay a la minute, and we warm it up with wood and fire. We place the tubers and roots [inside] and we cook them, trying to get most of the flavors [and] taste of the soil. When they are cooked we take them out and serve them with sauces like coca and honey, fresh cacao, and some seeds endemic to this region.
It is a traditional preparation and method that means caring and celebration, and what we do is just transform the whole ceremony into something sweet, into one of the desserts. We have two pictures: One is the sweet huatia that we serve in the dining room and the other one is the sweet huatia that we serve outdoors, just in front of the Moray ruins.”
The menu
Mil opens February 27, 2018.
Hillary Dixler Canavan is Eater’s restaurant editor.