Lima London: what happened to Virgilio Martínez’s restaurant in London that won a Michelin star?

Now, with the outstanding Peruvian chef Roberto Sihuay as culinary director and on the occasion of the first decade, the Lima restaurant presents a new menu of contemporary Peruvian cuisine that seeks to achieve the best standards, surprise its loyal diners with flavors that refer them to the three regions of Peru and once again achieve its Michelin star.

“With this new menu and new airs, it’s as if I were starting from scratch,” emphasizes the chef. “I wanted to take a trip through the Peruvian coast, mountains and jungle, but not focusing on a specific dish, but on the products. Being outside of Peru, we are a bit limited in terms of products and we are always fighting to bring something different, but the good thing is that exporters are getting their act together”, chef Sihuay tells us by phone from Ibiza, where he lives. . “I did want to present a lomo saltado, I do it with wagyu meat, a quality meat”, in this way one of our flagship dishes – such as lomo saltado – is found in London.

“We use a type of potato called potato oca, quite similar to the Peruvian oca. We have ceviche, tiradito, quinoto with a seafood rice sauce. Cow ribs cooked at low temperature, we bathe it with a dry sauce and a roasted mashed banana like the one you can eat in the jungle of Peru. Also, scallops that we find in London and we make a kind of carpaccio tiradito and tiger milk with olive oil and Parmesan cheese”, describes the chef about the current menu of Lima London.

For Sihuay it is extremely important that customers taste Peruvian flavors and fall in love with each bite of the gastronomic vastness of our country as did the Venezuelan brothers Gabriel and José Luis Gonzales, owners of Lima London, when trying Peruvian seasoning for the first time on a trip to Lima. It was so surprising for them that they decided to replicate these flavors in a restaurant called Lima in the capital of the United Kingdom, ten years ago.

The cocktail menu continues to pursue the goal of showing the world Peruvian flavors: “We have a menu based on pisco and we work with Peruvian products such as chili pepper, lime, passion fruit, pumpkin loche, among others. A city like London allows this type of gastronomic influences. London is home to many cultures from other countries and is a super open city for Peruvian food,” Sihuay highlights. Although not all products originating in Peru are found or they are not very profitable –such as lemons–, they look for the most similar ones and, in the kitchen, they work magic to maintain national flavors.

“Many clients know us, return or are new. The majority is local public and only 15% are Peruvian or Latino. Lima London is a reference in Peruvian cuisine”, says Roberto Sihuay, very enthusiastic and with much expectation for the new face of the restaurant. “Now that they celebrate the first decade of birth, how do you see the future?”, we asked the chef: “There is a great desire to continue growing and a renewal of everything. Our next step is to open a Nikkei restaurant in London, there is a lot of ‘field’ for that, people really like Asian cuisine. On the other hand, we are in talks to resume the Lima restaurant in Dubai that closed due to the pandemic. The idea of Lima London and the group of restaurants is to continue promoting Peruvian food and culture in the world.