Restaurante Huaca Pucllana

The Restaurant

Restaurante Huaca Pucllana sits on the eastern edge of Lima's Huaca Pucllana — a 1,500-year-old pre-Inca adobe pyramid complex in the Miraflores district — and is one of the most distinctive dining rooms in any major capital city in the world. The terrace, which runs along the boundary fence of the archaeological site, faces the pyramid directly, and the walkways and adobe structures are illuminated at night so that diners eat with the silhouette of the ancient stepped pyramid as a permanent backdrop. The main dining room, in a glass-and-timber pavilion at the centre of the terrace, holds about a hundred and twenty covers; the outer terrace holds another sixty under tropical hardwood beams and discreet outdoor heaters. After dinner, guests can walk the illuminated pyramid grounds with a guide — included in the dinner cover.

The cooking is modern Peruvian with deep grounding in the criolla canon. Signature plates include the cured-trout tiradito with passion-fruit leche de tigre, an Andean lamb shoulder slow-braised in Pisco with sweet potato and chimichurri, a hand-cut lomo saltado of beef tenderloin with chalaca onion and yellow chilli, a quinoa-and-shellfish risotto with parmesan foam, and a kid-goat seco a la norteña that runs as the kitchen's most-ordered main. The menu rotates with the Peruvian seasonal calendar and the chef makes deliberate use of native Andean grains, native Amazonian tubers, and produce from a network of small farms outside the city. The pisco programme is one of the most ambitious in Miraflores — over sixty references — and the wine list runs about three hundred bottles with respectable depth in Chilean and Argentine producers and a small but considered selection of Old World whites for tiradito pairing.

Service is the most polished in the upper-mid register of Lima dining: captains in dark linen who time a three-course dinner inside ninety minutes when the guest wants the post-dinner ruin tour, and stretch a six-course evening across three hours when the guest wants the long arc. Reservations released two to three weeks ahead for terrace tables — particularly the seven o'clock seating, when the pyramid lights come up in the last fifteen minutes of daylight and the sun sets across the Pacific in the distance behind the ruin. The pisco-sour programme is poured tableside.