About Food

Cooking is great. But Cusco has taught us that our interest in cooking wanes significantly with the availability of delicious, multi-course meals for $2-5 apiece.

There are a few distinctive varieties of restaurant we have run across so far in Cusco.

The Polleria: The most common type of restaurant are the pollerias and broasterias—restaurants specializing in chicken and other roasted meats. Walking past (which is the closest we have been to such restaurants) you can often see large stone ovens with 4-5 rotating spits, each containing 3-4 whole chickens. Because of the ubiquity of these restaurants, the number of whole chickens entering the city daily has been the subject of some speculation for us.

Vegetarian Restaurants: We've been frequenting a variety of restaurant I didn't expect Cusco to have—the local vegetarian hole-in-the-wall. I had (perhaps naively) assumed that if there were exclusively vegetarian restaurants they would market to upscale yuppie tourists. Instead, we were pleasantly surprised to find a robust culture of vegetarianism, and a greater density of vegetarian restaurants than many parts of the bay area.

The typical vegetarian restaurant we frequent is quite small, with 4 or 5 tables, often filled with locals, and offers a daily set menu for anywhere from 3 to 10 soles ($1-$3). The set menus usually include some kind of salad (often buffet style) consisting of parboiled carrots, beets, cabbage, potato, and other shredded vegetables (no greens); a hearty bowl of soup, bread, and your choice of a few daily main courses. If the menu's price is closer to 3 soles, you can expect main courses to be based almost exclusively on potato and/or eggs and rice (though there is a great variety of things one can do with these basic ingredients). As you get toward the 10 soles end, you branch out into other vegetables, grains, tofu, fake meats, etc. The set menus also typically include some kind of mate (that is—herbal tea infusion). Yesterday at lunch we had a delicious lemongrass infusion.

(Our--I should say Jen's--only disappointment so far has been the apparently sub-standard quality of the french fries. Though many restaurants offer fried potatoes, they tend to be kind of greesy and sad. Never having been much of a fan of the fry myself, I'm doing great).

Market Stalls:
The only way to eat even cheaper than the local hole-in-the-wall is to eat the snacks sold at stalls in the central market. It has several long rows of counters with 1 or 2 small wooden benches in front of each food stall. On our 3rd day, we enjoyed a breakfast of fried cheese on toasted bread for 1 sole each (30 cents). To our surprise, the elderly woman running the stall cut several slices of cheese off her wheel which she fried separately from the toasting bread. This turns out to be a delicious way to do "grilled cheese". You can get a fried egg on toasted bread for the same price. Other vendors sell chaufa, different kinds of soups, meat sandwiches, fried fish, etc. The market is certainly not on my list of cleanest places in the world, but it's a very lively and exciting place to be. The prepared food vendors occupy a place in the market next to large stainless steel containers of raw milk and butcher tables with many whole chicken and pig carcasses in various states of mutilation. If that's not a fun place to eat, I don't know what is!

Chifas:
Another very common variety of restaurant is the “Chifa”, or Chinese restaurant. They tend to be a little more expensive (10-20 soles, or $3-7), and it isn't unusal for them to be (apparently) run entirely by non-Chinese peruvians. “Chaufa” (fried rice) is far and away the most common dish served at every Chifa. Of the 30 or so Chifas we've walked past, every one has an entire column of their menu with 15 or 20 items that all say “chaufa con pollo”, “chaufa de verduras”, etc. Sometimes this assortment of chaufas constitutes their entire menu. Yesterday I did manage to discover a place that would give me a heaping plate of tofu and vegetables, but in my experience so far this is a rare occurrence.

For Tourists:
The last variety of restaurant are those aimed at tourists. They tend to be centered around the touristy Plaza de Armas, and can range in price from 20 to 40 soles ($7-14) (or perhaps more, we didn't really look very closely). Their menus are in English, and they often employ someone to stand in the street with a menu and attempt to shuttle tourists inside. In the evenings I've started replying to their invitates by saying “Gracias, pero ya he comido quatro churros!” which means “Thank you, but I've already eaten 4 churros!” (Often not far from the truth). This revelation has received many surprised and genuine laughs from the restaurant employees.

Bakeries:
There are many delicious and cheap bakeries everywhere. Every morning I walk to the bakery two blocks down the street from us and buy a “pye manzana”, which is something like a largish croissant, generously filled with apple pie filling. It costs 50 cents. For 30 cents, they also sell funnel shaped pastries filled with dulce de leche, large ovals of fried dough filled with a light coconut cream and dusted with powdered sugar, as well as several other confections we lack the vocabulary to describe. Almost every evening we walk to a stand which sells freshly fried churros—long, thin, fried bread with an apple cinnamon filling, and rolled in granulated sugar. Finally, it is not unheard-of for us to go to one of the many cake shops in the afternoon and buy a slice of one of their many varieties of cake--again, for 50 cents apiece--to top off lunch. Since we'll be in SE Asia soon, we thought it appropriate to eat as many non-bean-paste desserts as we could now, while we still have the chance. (Not that we dislike desserts filled with bean-paste; they're good too, just in a different way).

About the cuy:
"What about the guinea pig?" I hear you ask. Yes. Well, it's true that there might have been a lot of big talk before our departure about our plans to eat cuy. The real truth of the matter is this: We haven't seen cuy offered in any non-tourist restaurants. The cuy also tends to be comparitvely expensive, and, when push comes to shove, it's hard to pay 4 times as much as our normal, delicious meals to buy a cuy, which, at best, we will barely manage to choak down (and which would certainly necessitate 4-5 churros apiece to cleanse our palate, afterwards). So, no; despite the talk, it seems unlikely that we will be consuming those furry, lovable cuy on this trip.

On the other hand, I have begun referring to all the pigeons in the main square as squab.....