Gastón Acurio, the chef who looked out beyond his kitchen

Gastón Acurio was the first chef who changed everything. He introduced social cuisine as a form of total discipline. His work, his discourses - especially his 2006 speech from Universidad del Pacífico in Lima - his television programmes, the direct-relation models he establishes between his restaurants and the Andes producer or artisan fisherman or shellfish gatherers - have produced what many of us have called Peru's gastronomic revolution. An amazing transformation that shook the timbers of a country scourged by inequality and a lack of appreciation of its own assets. Peru was primarily a producer as a guarantor of produce, of social responsibility, of cuisine as a factor of progress, of the identity of a national identity associated with its cooking. Even before we were aware of gastronomy tourism, he presented the world with a language that introduced it as it was meant to be. 

First it worked with Peruvians, and finally pride in his flag took it farther afield to today's relationship with his culinary universe. The message was taken up in Latin America, and has finally reached Western cuisines. Peru and Gastón Acurio's work have launched a dual challenge for the world: gastronomy is a social discipline, and haute cuisine must be responsible if it is to merit the name. This led to a revolution on the rubble of the proclamation fifteen years previously at elBulli.

At that time, Gastón Acurio's works had already gone beyond the restaurant he opened with Astrid Gutsche when he returned to Lima from Paris, in calle Cantuarias, and had extended to La Mar and the first Tantas en Lima. Latin America had already heard of Astrid & Gastón, with their outlets in Santiago, Caracas, Quito, Bogotá, Panama City … it would not be long before they opened in Madrid, and tried to in New York, and finally the US expansion, with La Mar in San Francisco, Tanta in Chicago, another La Mar in Miami and now Jaleo, in New Jersey and Florida. 

Acurio Restaurantes now operates ten brands (Astrid & Gastón, La Mar, Tanta, Panchita, Papachos, El Bodegón, Yakumanka, Chicha, Jaleo and Manco) and has moved into Mexico City. Geneva, Barcelona or Dubai.

Peruvian cuisine is changing, and is living an experience it has never known before. It is also experiencing the latest culinary revolution of our times. Cuisine went down through time, taking knocks and convulsions that were definitive and also defining. It took quite a few, but the pace stepped up in the second half of the 20th century. Starting with the discovery of language as a consequence of the act of cooking emerging from the control of heat, followed by the major exchanges in the larder brought on by the silk route and the discovery of America, culminating in the French revolution, the nouvelle cuisine that took over from classic cuisine, the new Basque cuisine which amended it, and the technological revolution with elBulli. 

This may be what changed Peruvian cuisine; a discourse linking protection of biodiversity, commitment to sustainability, defence of social diversity and the undertaking of responsibilities in the development of society, the fight against hunger and the battle against poverty. All this is being considered in Peru through cooking. And it is all happening thanks to a movement generated barely fifteen years ago and launched by a chef who put Lima on the centre of the map.