Arequipa Food & Traditional Cuisine

Arequipa claims the best regional cuisine in Peru and has a reasonable case.

The institution is the picanteria: a traditional eating house, often family-run for generations, serving a different set dish for each day of the week alongside a standing menu, with chicha brewed on site. The system is old enough that locals know which day brings which dish, and the picanterias have been recognised as national cultural heritage.

The cooking is built on rocoto, a thick-fleshed red chilli that is genuinely hot, on camarones de rio — freshwater shrimp from the coastal valleys — and on long-cooked stews and chupes, thick soups enriched with milk, cheese and eggs.

It is heavier and more assertive than coastal Peruvian food, which suits the altitude and the cold nights.

Arequipa also makes excellent cheese and has a strong dairy tradition from the highland pastures.

Rocoto relleno is the emblem: a whole rocoto chilli stuffed with minced beef, olives, egg and cheese, baked with a gratin of potato. Properly made it is hot, and the local view is that removing the heat removes the dish.

Chupe de camarones, a thick river-shrimp chowder with milk, cheese, potato, egg and chilli, eaten on Fridays and considered the region’s finest dish.

Adobo arequipeno, pork marinated in chicha and cooked overnight, eaten on Sunday mornings with bread and generally understood to be a hangover cure.

Ocopa, boiled potatoes under a sauce of huacatay herb, chilli, peanuts and cheese — a bright green and unmistakable local speciality.

Solterito, a cold salad of broad beans, fresh cheese, onion, olives and rocoto.

Also: cuy chactado, guinea pig pressed flat under a stone and fried; queso helado, a frozen milk dessert despite the name; and alpaca from the high pastures.

San Camilo market in the city centre is the one to visit: fruit stalls with varieties found nowhere else, cheese and herb sellers, a juice row, and cooked-food counters at the back where a bowl of chupe costs very little.

Picanterias operate on a weekly rota — adobo on Sunday, chupe on Friday, and so on — and the traditional ones are in the outer neighbourhoods rather than the centre. Lunch is the main meal and they often close by late afternoon.

Chicha is brewed on the premises at proper picanterias and served in a wide glass; a chichera stirring a clay vat is a normal sight.

Anticuchos and grilled skewers appear on the streets in the evening.

Eating hours: lunch from about one, dinner rarely before eight.

Arequipa’s coastal valleys have a viticultural history going back to the sixteenth century, and a volcano ended the first version of it.

Vines were planted in the Vitor, Majes and Moquegua valleys soon after the Spanish arrived, and the region supplied wine and brandy to the Potosi mines. The Huaynaputina eruption of 1600 buried the vineyards in ash and destroyed the industry at its height; it recovered only partially, and Spanish restrictions on colonial wine pushed production toward distillation instead.

What survives is a tradition of rustic, often sweet wines from old criolla grape varieties, sold locally, and of pisco — the grape brandy that is Peru’s national spirit, produced in these valleys as well as further north. Several bodegas in the Vitor valley receive visitors.

Chicha de jora, maize beer, remains the everyday drink of the highlands and the picanterias, poured with a splash on the ground for Pachamama first.

The pisco sour and the coca-macerated variants are drunk everywhere in the city.