Cusco Region Food & Traditional Cuisine

Cusco eats Andean highland food, which is quite different from the coastal cooking that made Peru’s international reputation.

Potatoes are the foundation: Peru holds thousands of varieties and the Andes are where the species was domesticated, so the market stalls sell dozens of shapes and colours, plus chuno, potatoes freeze-dried over successive nights and days at altitude, a technique thousands of years old.

Maize here comes in enormous white kernels unlike anything grown elsewhere, eaten boiled with cheese or toasted as cancha.

Meat is alpaca, which is lean and good, and cuy — guinea pig — roasted whole for special occasions and domesticated in the Andes for millennia.

Soups are central and substantial, and a menu del dia at lunch will start with one.

Cusco also now has a serious restaurant scene applying Peru’s modern cooking to highland ingredients.

Cuy is the regional dish and the one visitors debate: guinea pig, roasted or fried whole, with crisp skin and not much meat, served at fiestas and Sunday lunches. It is a genuine Andean tradition rather than a novelty.

Alpaca steak, lean, dark and slightly sweet, now common in Cusco restaurants and better than beef at this altitude.

Chiri uchu, eaten on Corpus Christi Thursday: a cold plate assembling roast cuy, chicken, dried seaweed, fish roe, cheese, maize cake and sausage — each element from a different ecological zone, which is the point.

Rocoto relleno and adobo, both shared with Arequipa; adobo is a pork stew eaten on Sunday mornings.

Soups: chairo with chuno and lamb, and quinoa soup.

Also: papa a la huancaina, potatoes in a cheese and chilli sauce; lomo saltado, the Chinese-influenced beef stir-fry eaten everywhere in Peru; and trout from the highland lakes.

San Pedro market in Cusco is the essential one: juice stalls at the entrance, rows of potato and maize varieties, cheese, herbs sold by women who will tell you what each is for, and a row of cooked-food counters where the soup is very good and very cheap.

Pisac market on Sunday still functions as a produce and barter market for the highland communities alongside the craft stalls.

Chicherias in the villages fly a red plastic bag or a flower on a pole to show that fresh chicha is available — a working local signal rather than a tourist one.

The menu del dia at lunch — soup, main, drink — is the standard working meal and costs very little.

Pachamanca, meat and vegetables cooked underground on hot stones, is made for celebrations and can sometimes be arranged in the valley.

Cusco is far too high for vines, and its traditional drink is much older than wine in the Americas.

Chicha de jora is maize beer, fermented from sprouted maize, lightly alcoholic, cloudy and slightly sour. It has been made in the Andes for well over a thousand years, was central to Inca ritual and hospitality — the state brewed it in quantity for labour festivals — and is still made in village chicherias and drunk from a half-gourd. A small amount is customarily poured on the ground for Pachamama before drinking, and this is done without ceremony by people who simply always do it. The sweet purple chicha morada made from dried purple maize is a non-alcoholic drink sold everywhere and is a different thing entirely.

Pisco, the grape brandy, is Peru’s national spirit but is distilled on the coast; the pisco sour is drunk here as everywhere in the country.

Coca tea is offered on arrival at most hotels and is the standard local response to altitude.