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Nonfiction

The Age of Acurio

By Sergio Vilela
Translated from Spanish by David Kurnick

I grew up in a country at war. I still remember clearly a month in 1990 in which twelve bombs exploded near my house in Lima, one every two or three days. Peru was living through its worst years of violence, and the Shining Path—the dangerous terrorist group that controlled a large part of the Andean region—had succeeded in descending from the mountains to the coast, and was very close to dealing the final blow. Lima, at the edge of the sea, was preparing for a siege by the terrorists who by this point controlled a large part of the country. Once a month in school we practiced rushing from the classroom to the patio and throwing ourselves to the ground, facedown and with mouths open. When the teachers instructed us in the drill, which began with the peal of a bell, they explained that if we kept our mouths open the shock wave of a possible bomb would pass more easily through our bodies and leave our eardrums undamaged. These were the lessons of war.

I got used to talking to my friends about the amount of dynamite carried by car bombs. The TV news quickly taught me that eleven hundred pounds of dynamite would leave a hole more than a meter deep in asphalt, and that if the bomb carried a chemical called ANFO, its destructive power was multiplied. The threat of terrorist attacks had become common, and as a result no one knew where or when the next car bomb could explode in the city. The Shining Path attacked police stations, government offices—but also banks, embassies, private businesses. And if your school or your house was close to a possible target, it was likely that at least your windows would shatter in the middle of the night.

The day this happened in my house, my mother was alone, and luckily she instinctively got away from the windows. When she heard the explosion that sent one of the second-floor windows flying as she ran toward the street, she thought what we all did: we had learned from the sound of the explosion to orient our mental search for the source. I remember that hours later, when were able to embrace one another and assure ourselves that everyone in the family was safe, she said, “I thought the bomb was around the corner from the house, it sounded so loud.” That night the Shining Path attacked and destroyed the third national TV station, located a mile from our house. The next day the entire nation awoke horrified. The terrorists were taking the violence to an impossible extreme. They had been waging war for a decade, but the adults said that it was one thing to have them in the Andes and a very different thing to have them in the city, in the nation’s capital. So stark was the divide between the impoverished Andes and the slightly more developed capital that even after years of massacres in the mountains, the war had only recently begun to be taken seriously when it reached us. During those years in which the Shining Path kept the violence at a maximum, a curfew was imposed, because we already lived in darkness.

They blew up the energy towers constantly, and so the neighborhoods of Lima took turns living without electricity. It was normal to call up friends or family to ask if they had power and so to draw conclusions about which areas had been affected. My generation did its high school homework by candlelight, and as the economic crisis too had worsened, water was also rationed. At that time Peru had been broken by years of a closed economy, under a socialist model imposed by the young president, Alan García, who had taken power at thirty-five years of age as the leader of the historic APRA party. At the end of his term in the 1990s, the country was without reserves and suffered a cumulative hyperinflation of seven thousand percent in five years, so it was normal for me to go with my parents to the supermarket and wait in long lines when we learned that they had milk, rice, or sugar. They took me along because it was one kilo per person, it didn’t matter if one of them was a child—or that children in wartime are something other than children.

Looking back now, I understand why everything that happened afterward did so. And why it surprises us so much to seem now like a different country. But in those years, during which we didn’t leave Peru, during which we couldn’t leave, we grew up believing that normal life just was this way. We learned to study in the dark. To hand long strips of masking tape to Mother to protect the windows, because popular wisdom said that this would somehow help to contain the possible shards of a shattered windowpane. We learned to keep water in buckets so we could bathe when nothing came out of the taps. In such an environment even a child quickly understands that any idea of the future simply doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t much to worry about, because there wasn’t much of anything at all. I saw my cousins leave for the US, my aunts and uncles leave for Canada, my high school friends for Spain, my teachers for Italy, and I saw those who couldn’t pay for air travel also leave, by bus, for Argentina, for Chile. The important thing was to find some other country—any other country. We pitied those who stayed. We who stayed.

In 1992 Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path, was captured. Fujimori was president then. That same year he shut down Congress and kicked off a decade of excesses of power—with the backing of half the country, which supported his bloody fight against terrorism and his decision to open the economy and to sell almost all the state’s industries in order to escape bankruptcy. Within a few years Peru began to grow, and to climb with great effort out of the abyss into which it had fallen. At that time, many young people of the generation before mine—the ones who should have been running the country in a few years—had left to study abroad, to live abroad, to get as far away as possible from Peru. And they didn’t ever plan on coming back. Although by the end of the 1990s the country was peaceful and the war was beginning to fade into the past, and despite the fact that people were beginning to call Peru an economic miracle, those of my generation continued to grow up feeling we’d been assigned to a lost decade. We didn’t believe in anything, we didn’t admire anyone and we couldn’t believe that anything relevant to the world could ever come out of Peru. If Mario Vargas Llosa had returned from Europe in 1990, throwing himself into the unthinkable adventure of a presidential campaign only to lose to an unknown Fujimori—if the country had turned its back on him when he’d attempted to help at the worst moment of the crisis—nothing sensible could happen later.

Gastón Acurio was one of those young people who had emigrated to study, probably without any clear idea of ever returning. Even when he came back it was as if he’d stayed in Paris. His father had sent him to Spain to study law, and within months he’d moved to France and begun to use the money set aside for law school to defray the costs of his new course of study at a cooking school. He became a chef (against the wishes of his father), he fell in love with Astrid Gustche, a German classmate, he returned with her to Lima with the dream of opening his own French restaurant. With $25,000 borrowed from his father and some money he got from friends, the young Peruvian chef rented a house on a narrow street in the Miraflores neighborhood, and with his wife founded Astrid & Gastón. That’s how this story begins. It’s also the beginning of another story, the story of a Peru that was unthinkable in the war years in which I grew up.

I met Gastón Acurio when he hadn’t yet become Gastón Acurio. When he was still just a chef with good ideas, one whose biggest achievement had been to export his restaurant to Santiago de Chile. That an haute cuisine restaurant run by a Peruvian would end up with a branch in another country was news, and a reason for pride, in those years in which almost nothing was exported. From that moment, Gastón was spoken of in Peru as a stupendous chef, as a man who saw beyond his pots and pans, a man who’d taken French dishes off his menu to undertake the peculiar project of updating traditional Peruvian recipes. People started to refer to him as a pioneer, someone who had dared to use techniques learned abroad to give ceviche and lomo saltado the status of serious cuisine. This was a time at which European culinary traditions alone were valued in Lima’s elegant restaurants, and Acurio wanted to create the conditions for Peruvian flavors and ingredients to take on leading roles. Before he became a sort of living legend, he received me in the small office in the rear of his first restaurant. Within those four walls (crowded with chalkboards covered with infinite lists of the ingredients he would later combine mentally in making his menus), Acurio was imagining a future that seemed impossible to believe in then. In the years to come, his vision and his vehemence would prove so unusual that he attracted the attention of the media, which began to regard him with interest as a rare and exemplary specimen of postwar Peru.

Acurio spoke about the power of Peruvian cuisine as a possibility when there still seemed to be no possibility of anything. He spoke with contagious enthusiasm of the gigantic pantry of the Andes, of the variety of the cold Peruvian sea, as something unique that the world had yet to discover. He preached about the multiple gastronomic influences Peru had absorbed from immigrants from the whole world and from its own ancestral indigenous roots. The Chinese who arrived at the port of Callao had bequeathed to us, he said, the wielding of fire and the wok. The Japanese brought their knowledge of how to prepare fish and their use of knives. The Italians came with their entire traditions of baking and cake-making. The Arab influence, which arrived with the Spanish in the colonial period, brought stews and fine pastries. And from African slaves we had the technique of making use of entrails, at that time still not taken full advantage of. Acurio was already imagining a boom in Peruvian cuisine, if the country could manage to make a name for itself as a source of culinary exportation. If the world could be convinced that these flavors were unique, that a single dish could contain four of the five continents, the conquest would be definitive.

In the interviews he gave to the papers, Acurio already seemed like something more than a run-of-the-mill chef. He’d begin by talking about a recipe and end by saying that we had to believe that the Peruvian culinary brand could be successful and exportable. There was no one else like him in the country, not in the world of cuisine or in any of the other creative fields, not in the arts, politics, or business. Only pre-Nobel Mario Vargas Llosa had several decades on him as someone able to unite people around an idea. Acurio’s eloquence and optimism could seem like those of an unhinged enthusiast, but in his case, a personal credo in the making was combined with a startling capacity to get things done. And he was no longer alone. He had partners, he had a growing army of cooks, investors, advisors, other chefs at his professional level who began to see him as their leader, journalists who took him as an object of study, culinary students who wanted to work as he did, anthropologists who saw him as the subject of a possible thesis, TV producers who wanted him on their screens, editors who pursued him to produce a cookbook, assistants handling a growing number of requests of all types, people who stopped him in the street to congratulate him.

The country of the lost decade began to awaken slowly, and Acurio emerged as a sign of the new. Soon he appeared on TV, on a program on which he traversed the city seeking out cooks in modest and unknown restaurants who had recipes worthy of being celebrated. His fame grew. Seemingly overnight, he went from being a chef in an elite restaurant to appearing in cookbooks published by the country’s highest-circulation newspaper. Meanwhile, the two Astrid & Gaston restaurants had become a business—developing new brands featuring new culinary concepts—with which he began to take over Lima and later to expand throughout Latin America.

In a few short years he had gone from being the family man I’d accompanied one afternoon to a country club along with his friends, his daughters, and his wife, and who’d stationed himself at the grill to cook for all of them, to the chef-entrepreneur the whole world seemed more interested in talking to about business than recipes. Gradually, he left his kitchen behind to become the leader of a movement that he himself had created in people’s minds. A movement that in later years would become an association uniting the country’s most respected chefs, with whom he founded Mistura, Peru’s largest gastronomic fair, which brought together chefs from all over the world—along with restaurants, producers, growers, culinary students and diners—for two weeks in which all of Lima was transfixed around a table. And he has achieved all of this because his charisma has always been his banner—his way of speaking and of convincing akin to that of a politician campaigning to put an end to hunger. By the middle of the year 2000, Acurio’s idea of making Peruvian cuisine into an export brand had become a reality. He had restaurants in five countries, and he anticipated opening a total of forty embassies of Peruvian cuisine, as he decided to call them, in five more. His ability to sell his creations has always been boundless.

 

A decade has passed since I met him, and this morning Gastón Acurio seems to have time for everything. He appears in the hallway of his workshop—as he calls the house in Lima containing his laboratory and office—with his customary smile of an experienced diplomat. He walks to an adjacent room and makes himself comfortable on a sofa from which he commands the space. From the walls hang pans, pots, and serving spoons that seem to float in the air. If some chefs are famous for the singularity of their cooking, others are beloved for a rare ingredient that goes beyond the mechanics of the kitchen: in twenty years, Gastón Acurio has made his name into a trademark. Despite being the son of a former government minister and having studied at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, despite having a chauffeur who drives him around in a 4×4 pickup, despite the fact that his restaurants make more than $100 million annually, Gastón Acurio preserves that friendliness that has made him a leader of a culinary revolution. This is why the press in Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the US, Spain, and France continues to devote dozens of pages to his cooking and to the force with which Peruvian gastronomy landed in the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. And why this chef, aside from seeing his flagship restaurant, Lima’s Astrid & Gastón, listed as the fourteenth best restaurant in the world by the World’s Best 50 Restaurants awards, was also lauded by the pan-Latin American magazine América Economía as one of twelve men who have revolutionized business on the continent. 

But Gastón Acurio is not a genius or a vanguardist or a great maestro of world cuisine. Nor can he be summed up as a simple and charismatic man with a great sense for popular taste. Although he’s famous in several countries, he refrains from both the mannered sophistication of many fashionable chefs and the affected simplicity of those who make a show of eating with their hands. Acurio doesn’t wear a watch, he tends to keep his hands in his pockets, and he favors jeans and untucked T-shirts. He stands out mostly for his unruly mane of black hair and his belly, which suggests an expert gourmand who abstains from excess. If one were to make an inventory of the commonplaces one hears about him, one might start with the notion that he is so charismatic that he doesn’t have any enemies. So charismatic that in December 2013, he obtained a 47% approval rating in a poll conducted to determine voters’ intentions—the only nonpolitician to appear on the list. Perhaps we can take it as a measure of how crazy everyone in Peru is, or how desperate for heroes, that the nation could imagine its premier chef as a viable presidential candidate.

What strange power has led to Gastón Acurio being considered as a new national dignitary in Peru? From his seat on the sofa, he explains how one day the young Acurio, who had spent four years enclosed in Astrid & Gastón reproducing to the letter the techniques and recipes of French cuisine, took a trip through Peru that changed his life. He traveled along the coast, went into the Andes, and sailed on the rivers of the Amazon basin. He met peasants, farmers, fishermen. One of these encounters brought him to some cultivated farmland in Arequipa, in the Southern Andes. To this day, Acurio recalls that after their conversation the farmer showed him his lands and explained that the fruits were still hanging from the branches and were at the point of rotting there. A lack of resources was going to prevent him from selling his harvest at the local markets.

Acurio says now that the trip opened his eyes; it was a jolt of reality. He understood the absurdity of the fact that while he indulged his obsession with France, he knew little about the possibilities offered by the goods and culinary traditions of his own country. After this trip, he returned to his kitchen and began again. He started to investigate native ingredients, to rescue and modernize traditional Peruvian recipes. He devoted several years to working in silence, and he kept traveling, exploring markets in search of secrets from traditional cooks, Acurio had an idea: if the Italians had colonized every corner of the globe with pizza, why couldn’t ceviche become a global phenomenon? But this was more than just a question of national identity; it was also a powerful vision of how to develop a country’s economy. “In the 1980s,” Acurio says, gesturing with the confidence of a preacher, “Mexican cooking began to take off globally. At that time there were probably about five hundred Mexican restaurants: now there must be more than 200,000. As a result we’ve seen fashions in tequila, Corona, the specialty salsas you can find in any supermarket, and of course the chile, to the point where today Peru’s Virú Valley (on the northern coast) has to produce jalapeños because Mexican agriculture is no longer capable of meeting the global demand. At the beginning of the ’80s there weren’t sushi bars all over the world. Today there are more than 500,000 and thanks to them the world not only has new products but new concepts like teppanyakki, benihana, or the noodle bars that are so fashionable in Europe.” If a nation’s cuisine can conquer the world, might there not follow direct and indirect benefits sufficient to help the nation itself take off economically?

In 2006, Acurio gave a speech at a Lima university—a speech that went viral on social media because it gave the rationale behind his revolution. By then, the Peruvian capital had become the city with the most cooking schools in the world, with 80,000 students seeking to become the new Acurio. Nobody had yet overdosed on his image, and the criticisms that his detractors would levy in later years were still far off: “A country where a chef-entrepreneur is constantly consulted on politics, economics, production, nutrition, education, and the arts, a country where he is suggested as a presidential candidate and mentioned as the official voice of common sense, as if separating the fried potatoes from the meat in lomo saltado makes you into a new Leonardo—a country where this happens, I say, is a country that has lost all perspective,” declared the writer Gustavo Faverón.

But in 2006, his speech was applauded as the vision of a chef who had a plan—clearly presented and ambitious to boot—to permanently change the country. That night, before an auditorium filled with economics and business students, he said, “If we can imagine a scenario twenty years from now in which there are 200,000 Peruvian restaurants of all types all over the world, then we should imagine all the benefits this scenario entails. The demand for such common products as yellow potatoes, ají, red onions, rocoto peppers or limes will multiply infinitely, and with it we could—for example—eliminate poverty among rural farmers in the Andes.” Acurio said that cooking wasn’t just cooking; he spoke of gastronomy as a way of forging supply chains, of creating a network linking the countryside not just to the city but to the restaurant table, so that instead of turning its back on the peasantry, haute cuisine would instead join with it in a common project.

The chef continued: “If we succeed in making our cuisine fashionable, we will also see a growth in the production of spices, salsas, pisco, books, magazines devoted to gastro-tourism and culinary advice, snacks—everything that follows from the gastronomic concepts we already have.” If it’s true that Italy exports ingredients worth $5 billion simply because the concept known as pizza exists all over the world, “it’s easy to see,” Acurio added, “everything we can generate from the range of Peruvian culinary concepts. This would give the Peruvian brand a seductive power that wouldn’t just direct international attention toward other Peruvian ventures like fashion, design, jewelry, music, industry, and more, but would also incentivize and activate the creativity and confidence of our young people to create their own concepts and to have the bravery to take them out into the world.” That night Acurio received a standing ovation, and it was difficult to imagine that one of his allies, the Spanish restaurant critic Ignacio Medina, would publish a book entitled Mom, I Don’t Want to Grow Up to Be Gastón. It was Medina’s light-hearted way of telling his good friend that some of us were fed up with the gastonización of Peru.

I spent a few years as a professor in a department of journalism. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, it was common in the hallways to overhear students from various disciplines discussing their future prospects by saying “I want to be the Gastón of fashion, the Gastón of architecture, the Gastón of software, of tourism, of sports.” But even as his model of entrepreneurial energy and leadership proved more contagious, you also started to hear ironic culinary remarks—“Gastón’s been supersized”—that registered a protest against his brand’s dominance. One detractor defined it this way: “He’s somehow been endowed with a strange aura that combines the artist with the practical man, the patriot with the businessman, the regular guy with the hero and the visionary with the executive. A chimerical being perfect for these times in which the most popular literature is the bankbook of an artist who makes money.” What’s certain is that in a country destroyed in the 1980s—a country with no future and no heroes—the fact that a chef has become a potential presidential candidate says perhaps more about the scarcity caused by wars than it does about popular sentiment and the patriotic fanaticism he’s sparked.

Peru today is a different place. And the Acurios, who unintentionally woke up a country that had been dead for two decades, are responsible for an explosion that is now also cultural. The film industry has been reborn, for example. A country that recently had no movies or theaters saw the Peruvian film ¡Asu Mare! reach a historic 3.5 million viewers, a figure matched this year by the film’s sequel. It was a film with a local sense of humor, a comedy marshaling all the stereotypes of the crisis years to follow a protagonist from youth into adulthood. A simple, commercial, and effective film, with no greater artistic ambition than that represented by a heartwarming script—but one that even so revived a whole industry. Since then, more than ten Peruvian films—some more artistic, some more commercial, but all with the ambition to sustain an interest in local cinema that had disappeared —have attracted hordes of movie-goers. Theater, music, the fine arts, fashion, literature: all of them have gained something from that expansive wave of optimism caused by the boom in Peruvian cuisine, an optimism characterized by a sudden interest in looking again at ourselves. An interest in reading again—reading the new writers who want to tell stories that go beyond the war, that overcome the past by telling us about this new country that has taken us by surprise. A country that seemed impossible. A country that is now more than a bowl of ceviche.

“La Era de Acurio” © Sergio Vilela. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by David Kurnick. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

I grew up in a country at war. I still remember clearly a month in 1990 in which twelve bombs exploded near my house in Lima, one every two or three days. Peru was living through its worst years of violence, and the Shining Path—the dangerous terrorist group that controlled a large part of the Andean region—had succeeded in descending from the mountains to the coast, and was very close to dealing the final blow. Lima, at the edge of the sea, was preparing for a siege by the terrorists who by this point controlled a large part of the country. Once a month in school we practiced rushing from the classroom to the patio and throwing ourselves to the ground, facedown and with mouths open. When the teachers instructed us in the drill, which began with the peal of a bell, they explained that if we kept our mouths open the shock wave of a possible bomb would pass more easily through our bodies and leave our eardrums undamaged. These were the lessons of war.

I got used to talking to my friends about the amount of dynamite carried by car bombs. The TV news quickly taught me that eleven hundred pounds of dynamite would leave a hole more than a meter deep in asphalt, and that if the bomb carried a chemical called ANFO, its destructive power was multiplied. The threat of terrorist attacks had become common, and as a result no one knew where or when the next car bomb could explode in the city. The Shining Path attacked police stations, government offices—but also banks, embassies, private businesses. And if your school or your house was close to a possible target, it was likely that at least your windows would shatter in the middle of the night.

The day this happened in my house, my mother was alone, and luckily she instinctively got away from the windows. When she heard the explosion that sent one of the second-floor windows flying as she ran toward the street, she thought what we all did: we had learned from the sound of the explosion to orient our mental search for the source. I remember that hours later, when were able to embrace one another and assure ourselves that everyone in the family was safe, she said, “I thought the bomb was around the corner from the house, it sounded so loud.” That night the Shining Path attacked and destroyed the third national TV station, located a mile from our house. The next day the entire nation awoke horrified. The terrorists were taking the violence to an impossible extreme. They had been waging war for a decade, but the adults said that it was one thing to have them in the Andes and a very different thing to have them in the city, in the nation’s capital. So stark was the divide between the impoverished Andes and the slightly more developed capital that even after years of massacres in the mountains, the war had only recently begun to be taken seriously when it reached us. During those years in which the Shining Path kept the violence at a maximum, a curfew was imposed, because we already lived in darkness.

They blew up the energy towers constantly, and so the neighborhoods of Lima took turns living without electricity. It was normal to call up friends or family to ask if they had power and so to draw conclusions about which areas had been affected. My generation did its high school homework by candlelight, and as the economic crisis too had worsened, water was also rationed. At that time Peru had been broken by years of a closed economy, under a socialist model imposed by the young president, Alan García, who had taken power at thirty-five years of age as the leader of the historic APRA party. At the end of his term in the 1990s, the country was without reserves and suffered a cumulative hyperinflation of seven thousand percent in five years, so it was normal for me to go with my parents to the supermarket and wait in long lines when we learned that they had milk, rice, or sugar. They took me along because it was one kilo per person, it didn’t matter if one of them was a child—or that children in wartime are something other than children.

Looking back now, I understand why everything that happened afterward did so. And why it surprises us so much to seem now like a different country. But in those years, during which we didn’t leave Peru, during which we couldn’t leave, we grew up believing that normal life just was this way. We learned to study in the dark. To hand long strips of masking tape to Mother to protect the windows, because popular wisdom said that this would somehow help to contain the possible shards of a shattered windowpane. We learned to keep water in buckets so we could bathe when nothing came out of the taps. In such an environment even a child quickly understands that any idea of the future simply doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s why there wasn’t much to worry about, because there wasn’t much of anything at all. I saw my cousins leave for the US, my aunts and uncles leave for Canada, my high school friends for Spain, my teachers for Italy, and I saw those who couldn’t pay for air travel also leave, by bus, for Argentina, for Chile. The important thing was to find some other country—any other country. We pitied those who stayed. We who stayed.

In 1992 Abimael Guzman, leader of the Shining Path, was captured. Fujimori was president then. That same year he shut down Congress and kicked off a decade of excesses of power—with the backing of half the country, which supported his bloody fight against terrorism and his decision to open the economy and to sell almost all the state’s industries in order to escape bankruptcy. Within a few years Peru began to grow, and to climb with great effort out of the abyss into which it had fallen. At that time, many young people of the generation before mine—the ones who should have been running the country in a few years—had left to study abroad, to live abroad, to get as far away as possible from Peru. And they didn’t ever plan on coming back. Although by the end of the 1990s the country was peaceful and the war was beginning to fade into the past, and despite the fact that people were beginning to call Peru an economic miracle, those of my generation continued to grow up feeling we’d been assigned to a lost decade. We didn’t believe in anything, we didn’t admire anyone and we couldn’t believe that anything relevant to the world could ever come out of Peru. If Mario Vargas Llosa had returned from Europe in 1990, throwing himself into the unthinkable adventure of a presidential campaign only to lose to an unknown Fujimori—if the country had turned its back on him when he’d attempted to help at the worst moment of the crisis—nothing sensible could happen later.

Gastón Acurio was one of those young people who had emigrated to study, probably without any clear idea of ever returning. Even when he came back it was as if he’d stayed in Paris. His father had sent him to Spain to study law, and within months he’d moved to France and begun to use the money set aside for law school to defray the costs of his new course of study at a cooking school. He became a chef (against the wishes of his father), he fell in love with Astrid Gustche, a German classmate, he returned with her to Lima with the dream of opening his own French restaurant. With $25,000 borrowed from his father and some money he got from friends, the young Peruvian chef rented a house on a narrow street in the Miraflores neighborhood, and with his wife founded Astrid & Gastón. That’s how this story begins. It’s also the beginning of another story, the story of a Peru that was unthinkable in the war years in which I grew up.

I met Gastón Acurio when he hadn’t yet become Gastón Acurio. When he was still just a chef with good ideas, one whose biggest achievement had been to export his restaurant to Santiago de Chile. That an haute cuisine restaurant run by a Peruvian would end up with a branch in another country was news, and a reason for pride, in those years in which almost nothing was exported. From that moment, Gastón was spoken of in Peru as a stupendous chef, as a man who saw beyond his pots and pans, a man who’d taken French dishes off his menu to undertake the peculiar project of updating traditional Peruvian recipes. People started to refer to him as a pioneer, someone who had dared to use techniques learned abroad to give ceviche and lomo saltado the status of serious cuisine. This was a time at which European culinary traditions alone were valued in Lima’s elegant restaurants, and Acurio wanted to create the conditions for Peruvian flavors and ingredients to take on leading roles. Before he became a sort of living legend, he received me in the small office in the rear of his first restaurant. Within those four walls (crowded with chalkboards covered with infinite lists of the ingredients he would later combine mentally in making his menus), Acurio was imagining a future that seemed impossible to believe in then. In the years to come, his vision and his vehemence would prove so unusual that he attracted the attention of the media, which began to regard him with interest as a rare and exemplary specimen of postwar Peru.

Acurio spoke about the power of Peruvian cuisine as a possibility when there still seemed to be no possibility of anything. He spoke with contagious enthusiasm of the gigantic pantry of the Andes, of the variety of the cold Peruvian sea, as something unique that the world had yet to discover. He preached about the multiple gastronomic influences Peru had absorbed from immigrants from the whole world and from its own ancestral indigenous roots. The Chinese who arrived at the port of Callao had bequeathed to us, he said, the wielding of fire and the wok. The Japanese brought their knowledge of how to prepare fish and their use of knives. The Italians came with their entire traditions of baking and cake-making. The Arab influence, which arrived with the Spanish in the colonial period, brought stews and fine pastries. And from African slaves we had the technique of making use of entrails, at that time still not taken full advantage of. Acurio was already imagining a boom in Peruvian cuisine, if the country could manage to make a name for itself as a source of culinary exportation. If the world could be convinced that these flavors were unique, that a single dish could contain four of the five continents, the conquest would be definitive.

In the interviews he gave to the papers, Acurio already seemed like something more than a run-of-the-mill chef. He’d begin by talking about a recipe and end by saying that we had to believe that the Peruvian culinary brand could be successful and exportable. There was no one else like him in the country, not in the world of cuisine or in any of the other creative fields, not in the arts, politics, or business. Only pre-Nobel Mario Vargas Llosa had several decades on him as someone able to unite people around an idea. Acurio’s eloquence and optimism could seem like those of an unhinged enthusiast, but in his case, a personal credo in the making was combined with a startling capacity to get things done. And he was no longer alone. He had partners, he had a growing army of cooks, investors, advisors, other chefs at his professional level who began to see him as their leader, journalists who took him as an object of study, culinary students who wanted to work as he did, anthropologists who saw him as the subject of a possible thesis, TV producers who wanted him on their screens, editors who pursued him to produce a cookbook, assistants handling a growing number of requests of all types, people who stopped him in the street to congratulate him.

The country of the lost decade began to awaken slowly, and Acurio emerged as a sign of the new. Soon he appeared on TV, on a program on which he traversed the city seeking out cooks in modest and unknown restaurants who had recipes worthy of being celebrated. His fame grew. Seemingly overnight, he went from being a chef in an elite restaurant to appearing in cookbooks published by the country’s highest-circulation newspaper. Meanwhile, the two Astrid & Gaston restaurants had become a business—developing new brands featuring new culinary concepts—with which he began to take over Lima and later to expand throughout Latin America.

In a few short years he had gone from being the family man I’d accompanied one afternoon to a country club along with his friends, his daughters, and his wife, and who’d stationed himself at the grill to cook for all of them, to the chef-entrepreneur the whole world seemed more interested in talking to about business than recipes. Gradually, he left his kitchen behind to become the leader of a movement that he himself had created in people’s minds. A movement that in later years would become an association uniting the country’s most respected chefs, with whom he founded Mistura, Peru’s largest gastronomic fair, which brought together chefs from all over the world—along with restaurants, producers, growers, culinary students and diners—for two weeks in which all of Lima was transfixed around a table. And he has achieved all of this because his charisma has always been his banner—his way of speaking and of convincing akin to that of a politician campaigning to put an end to hunger. By the middle of the year 2000, Acurio’s idea of making Peruvian cuisine into an export brand had become a reality. He had restaurants in five countries, and he anticipated opening a total of forty embassies of Peruvian cuisine, as he decided to call them, in five more. His ability to sell his creations has always been boundless.

 

A decade has passed since I met him, and this morning Gastón Acurio seems to have time for everything. He appears in the hallway of his workshop—as he calls the house in Lima containing his laboratory and office—with his customary smile of an experienced diplomat. He walks to an adjacent room and makes himself comfortable on a sofa from which he commands the space. From the walls hang pans, pots, and serving spoons that seem to float in the air. If some chefs are famous for the singularity of their cooking, others are beloved for a rare ingredient that goes beyond the mechanics of the kitchen: in twenty years, Gastón Acurio has made his name into a trademark. Despite being the son of a former government minister and having studied at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, despite having a chauffeur who drives him around in a 4×4 pickup, despite the fact that his restaurants make more than $100 million annually, Gastón Acurio preserves that friendliness that has made him a leader of a culinary revolution. This is why the press in Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the US, Spain, and France continues to devote dozens of pages to his cooking and to the force with which Peruvian gastronomy landed in the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. And why this chef, aside from seeing his flagship restaurant, Lima’s Astrid & Gastón, listed as the fourteenth best restaurant in the world by the World’s Best 50 Restaurants awards, was also lauded by the pan-Latin American magazine América Economía as one of twelve men who have revolutionized business on the continent. 

But Gastón Acurio is not a genius or a vanguardist or a great maestro of world cuisine. Nor can he be summed up as a simple and charismatic man with a great sense for popular taste. Although he’s famous in several countries, he refrains from both the mannered sophistication of many fashionable chefs and the affected simplicity of those who make a show of eating with their hands. Acurio doesn’t wear a watch, he tends to keep his hands in his pockets, and he favors jeans and untucked T-shirts. He stands out mostly for his unruly mane of black hair and his belly, which suggests an expert gourmand who abstains from excess. If one were to make an inventory of the commonplaces one hears about him, one might start with the notion that he is so charismatic that he doesn’t have any enemies. So charismatic that in December 2013, he obtained a 47% approval rating in a poll conducted to determine voters’ intentions—the only nonpolitician to appear on the list. Perhaps we can take it as a measure of how crazy everyone in Peru is, or how desperate for heroes, that the nation could imagine its premier chef as a viable presidential candidate.

What strange power has led to Gastón Acurio being considered as a new national dignitary in Peru? From his seat on the sofa, he explains how one day the young Acurio, who had spent four years enclosed in Astrid & Gastón reproducing to the letter the techniques and recipes of French cuisine, took a trip through Peru that changed his life. He traveled along the coast, went into the Andes, and sailed on the rivers of the Amazon basin. He met peasants, farmers, fishermen. One of these encounters brought him to some cultivated farmland in Arequipa, in the Southern Andes. To this day, Acurio recalls that after their conversation the farmer showed him his lands and explained that the fruits were still hanging from the branches and were at the point of rotting there. A lack of resources was going to prevent him from selling his harvest at the local markets.

Acurio says now that the trip opened his eyes; it was a jolt of reality. He understood the absurdity of the fact that while he indulged his obsession with France, he knew little about the possibilities offered by the goods and culinary traditions of his own country. After this trip, he returned to his kitchen and began again. He started to investigate native ingredients, to rescue and modernize traditional Peruvian recipes. He devoted several years to working in silence, and he kept traveling, exploring markets in search of secrets from traditional cooks, Acurio had an idea: if the Italians had colonized every corner of the globe with pizza, why couldn’t ceviche become a global phenomenon? But this was more than just a question of national identity; it was also a powerful vision of how to develop a country’s economy. “In the 1980s,” Acurio says, gesturing with the confidence of a preacher, “Mexican cooking began to take off globally. At that time there were probably about five hundred Mexican restaurants: now there must be more than 200,000. As a result we’ve seen fashions in tequila, Corona, the specialty salsas you can find in any supermarket, and of course the chile, to the point where today Peru’s Virú Valley (on the northern coast) has to produce jalapeños because Mexican agriculture is no longer capable of meeting the global demand. At the beginning of the ’80s there weren’t sushi bars all over the world. Today there are more than 500,000 and thanks to them the world not only has new products but new concepts like teppanyakki, benihana, or the noodle bars that are so fashionable in Europe.” If a nation’s cuisine can conquer the world, might there not follow direct and indirect benefits sufficient to help the nation itself take off economically?

In 2006, Acurio gave a speech at a Lima university—a speech that went viral on social media because it gave the rationale behind his revolution. By then, the Peruvian capital had become the city with the most cooking schools in the world, with 80,000 students seeking to become the new Acurio. Nobody had yet overdosed on his image, and the criticisms that his detractors would levy in later years were still far off: “A country where a chef-entrepreneur is constantly consulted on politics, economics, production, nutrition, education, and the arts, a country where he is suggested as a presidential candidate and mentioned as the official voice of common sense, as if separating the fried potatoes from the meat in lomo saltado makes you into a new Leonardo—a country where this happens, I say, is a country that has lost all perspective,” declared the writer Gustavo Faverón.

But in 2006, his speech was applauded as the vision of a chef who had a plan—clearly presented and ambitious to boot—to permanently change the country. That night, before an auditorium filled with economics and business students, he said, “If we can imagine a scenario twenty years from now in which there are 200,000 Peruvian restaurants of all types all over the world, then we should imagine all the benefits this scenario entails. The demand for such common products as yellow potatoes, ají, red onions, rocoto peppers or limes will multiply infinitely, and with it we could—for example—eliminate poverty among rural farmers in the Andes.” Acurio said that cooking wasn’t just cooking; he spoke of gastronomy as a way of forging supply chains, of creating a network linking the countryside not just to the city but to the restaurant table, so that instead of turning its back on the peasantry, haute cuisine would instead join with it in a common project.

The chef continued: “If we succeed in making our cuisine fashionable, we will also see a growth in the production of spices, salsas, pisco, books, magazines devoted to gastro-tourism and culinary advice, snacks—everything that follows from the gastronomic concepts we already have.” If it’s true that Italy exports ingredients worth $5 billion simply because the concept known as pizza exists all over the world, “it’s easy to see,” Acurio added, “everything we can generate from the range of Peruvian culinary concepts. This would give the Peruvian brand a seductive power that wouldn’t just direct international attention toward other Peruvian ventures like fashion, design, jewelry, music, industry, and more, but would also incentivize and activate the creativity and confidence of our young people to create their own concepts and to have the bravery to take them out into the world.” That night Acurio received a standing ovation, and it was difficult to imagine that one of his allies, the Spanish restaurant critic Ignacio Medina, would publish a book entitled Mom, I Don’t Want to Grow Up to Be Gastón. It was Medina’s light-hearted way of telling his good friend that some of us were fed up with the gastonización of Peru.

I spent a few years as a professor in a department of journalism. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, it was common in the hallways to overhear students from various disciplines discussing their future prospects by saying “I want to be the Gastón of fashion, the Gastón of architecture, the Gastón of software, of tourism, of sports.” But even as his model of entrepreneurial energy and leadership proved more contagious, you also started to hear ironic culinary remarks—“Gastón’s been supersized”—that registered a protest against his brand’s dominance. One detractor defined it this way: “He’s somehow been endowed with a strange aura that combines the artist with the practical man, the patriot with the businessman, the regular guy with the hero and the visionary with the executive. A chimerical being perfect for these times in which the most popular literature is the bankbook of an artist who makes money.” What’s certain is that in a country destroyed in the 1980s—a country with no future and no heroes—the fact that a chef has become a potential presidential candidate says perhaps more about the scarcity caused by wars than it does about popular sentiment and the patriotic fanaticism he’s sparked.

Peru today is a different place. And the Acurios, who unintentionally woke up a country that had been dead for two decades, are responsible for an explosion that is now also cultural. The film industry has been reborn, for example. A country that recently had no movies or theaters saw the Peruvian film ¡Asu Mare! reach a historic 3.5 million viewers, a figure matched this year by the film’s sequel. It was a film with a local sense of humor, a comedy marshaling all the stereotypes of the crisis years to follow a protagonist from youth into adulthood. A simple, commercial, and effective film, with no greater artistic ambition than that represented by a heartwarming script—but one that even so revived a whole industry. Since then, more than ten Peruvian films—some more artistic, some more commercial, but all with the ambition to sustain an interest in local cinema that had disappeared —have attracted hordes of movie-goers. Theater, music, the fine arts, fashion, literature: all of them have gained something from that expansive wave of optimism caused by the boom in Peruvian cuisine, an optimism characterized by a sudden interest in looking again at ourselves. An interest in reading again—reading the new writers who want to tell stories that go beyond the war, that overcome the past by telling us about this new country that has taken us by surprise. A country that seemed impossible. A country that is now more than a bowl of ceviche.

“La Era de Acurio” © Sergio Vilela. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2015 by David Kurnick. All rights reserved.

La Era de Acurio

Crecí en un país en guerra. Entonces era 1990 y todavía recuerdo con claridad que hubo un mes en el estallaron doce bombas que alrededor de mi casa en Lima. Una cada dos o tres días. El Perú vivía sus peores años de violencia y Sendero Luminoso, que llevaba cerca de una década como un peligroso grupo terrorista que controlaba gran parte de los Andes, había logrado bajar de las montañas a la costa, y estaba muy cerca de dar el golpe final. Lima, al pie del mar, estaba casi sitiada por los terroristas que entonces controlaban gran parte del país. Por eso, en la escuela nos preparaban, una vez por mes, para salir disparados del salón de clase al patio y para tirarnos al suelo, de cara al pavimento y con la boca abierta. Cuando los profesores nos guiaban en el simulacro que iniciaba con el estruendo de una campana, nos explicaban que si manteníamos la boca abierta, la onda expansiva de una posible bomba, cruzaría más fácil por nuestro cuerpo y no nos dañaría los tímpanos. Eran las lecciones de la guerra.

Me acostumbré a hablar con mis amigos de la cantidad de dinamita que llevaban los coches bomba que estallaban. Supe pronto por los noticieros que quinientos kilos de dinamita dejaban un forado de más de un metro de profundidad en el asfalto, y que si además le ponían un químico llamado anfo el poder destructivo se multiplicaba. Las amenazas de atentados terroristas se habían vuelto comunes, y por eso nadie sabía ni dónde ni cuándo podía estallar el próximo coche bomba en la ciudad. Sendero Luminoso atacaba estaciones de policías, oficinas del gobierno, pero también bancos, embajadas, empresa privadas. Y si tu colegio o tu casa quedaba cerca de algún posible blanco, era probable que al menos las ventanas de tu casa estallaran en medio de la noche.

El día que sucedió en mi casa, mi madre estaba sola y por suerte se alejó instintivamente de los vidrios. Cuando escuchó el estallido que hizo volar una ventana del segundo piso, mientras ella corría hacia la calle, pensó lo que pensábamos todos: habíamos aprendido por el sonido de la explosión a orientar nuestra búsqueda mental del objetivo. Recuerdo que horas después, cuando pudimos abrazarnos y comprobar que seguíamos completos en mi familia, ella dijo: “creía que la bomba la habían puesto a la vuelta de la casa, porque sonó fortísimo”. Esa noche Sendero Luminoso atacó y destrozó la estación de la tercera cadena de televisión nacional, que quedaba a dos kilómetros de casa. Al día siguiente el país entero se levantó horrorizado. Los terroristas estaban llegando a un extremo imposible de violencia. Llevaban una década de guerra, pero entonces los adultos decían que una cosa era que hubieran estado en los Andes y otra muy diferente era que hubieran llegado a la ciudad, a la capital del país. Así de cruda era la fractura entre los Andes empobrecidos y Lima algo más desarrollada, que tras años de masacres en las montañas, la guerra recién se tomó en serio cuando nos llegó a nosotros. Durante esos años en que Sendero Luminoso mantuvo la hostilidad a tope, se instauró el toque de queda, porque además vivíamos a oscuras.

Hacían estallar las torres de energía a cada momento y entonces nos turnábamos, entre los distritos de Lima, la falta de electricidad. Era normal llamar por teléfono a los amigos o familiares para preguntar “¿por tu casa hay luz?” y así sacar conclusiones de cuáles eran las zonas afectadas. Los de mi generación nos acostumbramos a hacer las tareas del colegio a la luz de las velas, y como la crisis económica también se había extremado, el agua también se racionaba. Para entonces el Perú estaba quebrado, tras años de tener una economía cerrada, bajo un modelo socialista implantado por un joven presidente, Alan García, que llegó al poder a los treinta y cinco años, representando al histórico partido del Apra. Al final de su gobierno, en los noventa, el país no tenía reservas internacionales, pero sí una hiperinflación acumulada de siete mil por ciento en cinco años, y por eso para mi era normal ir con mis padres al supermercado y hacer largas colas cuando nos enterábamos que había llegado la leche, el arroz, el azúcar. Me llevaban porque era un kilo por persona, no importaba que fueras un niño. Aunque los niños durante una guerra son menos niños.    

Ahora que miro atrás entiendo por qué ha pasado todo lo que sucedió después. Y por qué nos asombra tanto parecer otro país. Pero por eso años, los que no nos fuimos del Perú, los que no nos pudimos ir, crecimos creyendo que la vida normal era esa. Aprendimos a estudiar a oscuras. A pasarle largas tiras de cinta adhesiva a mamá, para que protegiera las ventanas porque la sabiduría popular de la guerra decía que eso ayudaba de algún modo a contener las posibles esquirlas de un vidrio estallado. Aprendimos a guardar agua en baldes para poder bañarnos cuando no saliera de la llave. A pesar de que uno es niño, en medio de ese ambiente, entiende pronto que cualquier idea de futuro simplemente no existe. Quizá por eso no hubo mucho de qué preocuparse, porque no había nada. Vi irse a mis primos a Estados Unidos, a mis tíos a Canadá, a mis amigos del colegio a España, a mis profesores a Italia, y al que no podía pagar un pasaje de avión también lo vi irse a Argentina en bus, a Chile. Lo importante era buscar otro país. Cualquiera. Pobres lo que se quedaban. Los que nos quedamos.

En 1992 cayó Abimael Guzmán, líder de Sendero Luminoso. Fujimori era el presidente de entonces. Ese mismo año disolvió el Congreso y dio inicio a una década de excesos de poder, avalados por medio país, que apoyaba su sangrienta lucha contra el terrorismo y su decisión de abrir la economía y vender casi todas las empresas del Estado para salir de la bancarrota. En unos pocos años el Perú empezó a crecer y a trepar con mucho esfuerzo desde el fondo del abismo al que había caído. Para entonces, miles de jóvenes que eran de una generación mayor a la mía y que debían ser los que llevaría las riendas del país unos años más tarde, se habían ido a estudiar fuera, a vivir fuera, a estar lo más lejos posible del Perú. Y no pensaban volver nunca. Aunque para finales de los noventa el país estaba en calma y la guerra empezaba a quedar atrás, y pese a que se empezaba a hablar del Perú como un milagro económico, los de mi generación seguíamos creciendo con la sensación de que nos había tocado vivir en la década perdida. Por eso no creíamos en nada, no admirábamos a nadie, y no podíamos creer que del Perú pudiera nacer algo relevante para el mundo. Si Mario Vargas Llosa había regresado de Europa y se había lanzando a la impensable aventura de la carrera para la presidencia y había perdido frente a un desconocido Fujimori en 1990, si el propio país le había dado la espalda cuando él había intentando ayudar en el peor momento de crisis, nada sensato podía ocurrir luego.

Gastón Acurio fue uno de esos jóvenes que se había ido a estudiar fuera quizá sin tener muy claro la idea de volver. Incluso cuando regresó fue como si se hubiera quedado en París. Su padre lo había mandando a España a estudiar Derecho y él a los meses, sin decirle a nadie, se mudó a Francia y empezó a usar el dinero que debía pagar a la escuela de abogacía para pagar su nueva escuela de cocina. Se hizo chef, en contra del deseo de su padre, se enamoró de Astrid Gustche, una estudiante alemana con quien compartía clases, regresó con ella a Lima con la ilusión de abrir su propio restaurante de cocina francesa. Con veinticinco mil dólares que le prestó su papá y otro dinero que consiguió de amigos, el joven cocinero peruano arrendó una casa en una estrecha calle del distrito de Miraflores, y de la mano de su mujer fundó el restaurante Astrid & Gastón. Ahí comienza esta historia. Y, sin querer, también comienza la otra historia de ese Perú que era impensable en los años de la guerra en que crecí.

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Conocí a Gastón Acurio cuando aún no era Gastón Acurio. Cuando todavía era sólo un cocinero con buenas ideas, y cuyo mayor mérito había sido exportar su restaurante a Santiago de Chile. Que un restaurante de alta cocina, comandado por un peruano desembarcara en otro país era noticia y motivo de orgullo, en esos años donde casi nada se exportaba. Después de eso en el Perú ya se hablaba de él como un estupendo chef, como un hombre que estaba viendo más allá de sus sartenes y sus ollas y que había renunciado a ofrecer cocina francesa en su carta, porque se había lanzado a la extraña empresa de sofisticar las recetas tradicionales de la cocina peruana. Entonces, su nombre empezó a sonar como el de un pionero, como el de alguien que se atrevía a darle estatus de alta cocina a un ceviche o a un lomo saltado, a partir su conocimiento de las técnicas aprendidas afuera. Era una época donde lo único que se valoraba en los más elegantes restaurantes de Lima era la cocina europea y Acurio quiso crear una corriente con la que los sabores y los ingredientes del Perú pasaron a ser protagonistas. Antes de que se convirtiera en su propia leyenda, una mañana me recibió en la pequeña oficina que tenía en la trastienda de su primer restaurante. Dentro de esas cuatro paredes, de las que colgaban varias pizarras en las que había anotado infinitas listas de ingredientes que le servían luego para armar combinaciones mentales para sus cartas, Acurio se la pasaba imaginando un futuro que entonces parecía imposible de creer. Desde aquellos años su visión y su vehemencia eran tan inusuales que los medios lo empezaron a mirar con interés, como un raro espécimen ejemplar del Perú de postguerra.

Acurio hablaba del poder de la cocina peruana como posibilidad cuando no había aún posibilidad de nada. Hablaba con un entusiasmo contagioso de la despensa gigantesca de los Andes y la variedad del frío mar peruano como algo único que el mundo no había descubierto todavía. Predicaba sobre las múltiples influencias gastronómicas que tenía el Perú, por sus migraciones de todo el globo y por sus raíces indígenas ancestrales. Los chinos que llegaron al puerto del Callao nos habían heredado, decía, el manejo del fuego y el wok. Los japoneses trajeron su sabiduría respecto al modo de tratar el pescado y sus técnicas de corte. Los italianos desembarcaron con toda su tradición pastelera y panadera. La influencia árabe, que llegó con los españoles durante la colonia, aportó la forma de guisar y también la repostería fina. Y de los esclavos africanos quedó el modo en que se aprendieron a aprovechar las entrañas, que hasta entonces eran un desperdicio. Acurio ya se imaginaba el estallido de un boom de la cocina peruana si es que se lograba construir entre todos una marca culinaria de exportación. Si se conseguía convencer al mundo de que sus sabores eran únicos y que en un solo plato podían habitar cuatro de los cinco continentes, la conquista sería definitiva.  

En cada entrevista que daba a los periódicos, Acurio ya no parecía ser un cocinero normal. Empezaba hablando de una receta y terminaba diciendo que había que creerse que la marca cocina peruana podía ser exitosa y exportable. No había otro como él. Ni dentro de una cocina, ni en algún otro ámbito de la creación, de las artes, de la política, de los negocios, dentro del país. Sólo Mario Vargas Llosa antes del Nobel, le llevaba varias décadas de ventaja en cuanto a su capacidad de reunir gente alrededor de una idea. La elocuencia y optimismo de Acurio podían parecer las de un entusiasta desubicado, pero en su caso se combinaba ese credo personal que aún estaba construyendo con una asombrosa capacidad de hacer. Ya no estaba sólo. Tenía socios, tenía un creciente ejercito de cocineros, inversionistas, asesores, otros chefs de su mismo novel que lo empezaban a ver como su líder, periodistas que lo tomaban como objeto de estudio, estudiantes de cocina que querían trabajar con él, antropólogos que lo miraban como posible tesis, productores de televisión que lo querían en pantalla, editores de libros de recetas que lo perseguían, asistentes que atajaban las crecientes solicitudes de todo tipo, gente que lo empezaba a parar en la calle para felicitarlo.  

El país de la década perdida despertaba lentamente y con él, la era de Acurio asomaba como síntoma de los nuevos tiempos. No tardó en aparecer en la televisión con un programa con el que recorría la ciudad buscando a los cocineros y cocineras de restaurantes modestos y desconocidos, que tenían recetas dignas de ser valoradas. Su fama crecía. De un momento a otro dejó de ser un chef de un restaurante de élite y pasó a ser el cocinero que aparecía en libros de recetas que publicaba el periódico de mayor circulación del país. Mientras sus dos restaurantes Astrid y Gastón se convertían en una empresa que desarrollaba otras marcas, con otros conceptos culinarios y con los que empezaba a invadir Lima, y luego a expandirse por Latinoamérica.

En muy pocos años pasó de ser ese padre de familia al que acompañé una tarde a un club campestre con sus amigos, sus hijas y su mujer, y que se daba tiempo de ponerse al frente de la parrilla para cocinarles, a ser el cocinero-empresario con el que todo el mundo quería hablar de negocios más que de recetas. Poco a poco fue dejando su cocina para convertirse en el líder de un movimiento que el mismo fue metiendo en la cabeza de la gente. Un movimiento que años más tarde convertiría en una asociación en la que ha reunido a los cocineros más respetados del país, y con quienes fundó Mistura, la feria gastronómica más grande del continente y que reúne a cocineros de todo el mundo, restaurantes, productores, agricultores, estudiantes y comensales durante dos semanas en que Lima se paraliza alrededor de una mesa. Y lo ha logrado porque su carisma siempre ha sido su bandera: su forma de hablar y de convencer, como la de un político en campaña que quiere acabar con el hambre. Para mediados del dos mil Acurio se había convertido en un hombre tan popular porque su idea de hacer de la cocina peruana una marca de exportación, había dejado de ser un proyecto y había empezado a hacerla realidad. Entonces, tenía restaurantes en cinco países, y adelantaba que abriría en cinco países más un total de cuarenta embajadas de la cocina peruana, como se le ocurrió llamarlos. Su capacidad de vender sus inventos siempre ha sido infinita.

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Ha pasado una década desde que lo conocí y esta mañana Gastón Acurio parece que tiene tiempo para todo. Aparece en el corredor de su taller –como llama a la casa donde está su laboratorio y su oficina en Lima–, con su habitual sonrisa de diplomático experimentado. Camina hacia una sala contigua y se acomoda en un sofá desde el que domina el espacio. De las paredes cuelgan sartenes, ollas, cucharones, que parecen flotar alrededor del salón. Si hay chefs célebres por la singularidad de su cocina, los hay queridos por un raro ingrediente que va más allá de un tenedor y un cuchillo: en veinte años, Gastón Acurio ha convertido su nombre en una marca registrada. Aunque sea el hijo de un ex primer ministro y haya estudiado cocina en Le Cordon Bleu de París, aunque tenga un chofer que lo lleva en una camioneta 4×4, y sus restaurantes facturen más de cien millones de dólares al año, Gastón Acurio sigue conservando esa simpatía que lo ha convertido en el líder de una revolución con cuchara y que lo ha llevado a exportar la cocina peruana a más de una decena de países, en los que ha levantado unos cuarenta restaurantes. Por eso en Perú, Colombia, México, Estados Unidos, España, Francia la prensa le sigue dedicando docenas de páginas a su cocina y a la fuerza con que la gastronomía peruana aterrizó en la ciudades más cosmopolitas del mundo. Y es que este cocinero, además de haber logrado colocar su restaurante más emblemático, el Astrid & Gastón de Lima, en el puesto número 14 del mundo, fue premiado por una revista continental como América Economía como uno de los doce hombres que han revolucionado el mundo de los negocios en América Latina. 

Pero Gastón Acurio no es un genio ni un vanguardista ni un gran maestro de la cocina mundial. Tampoco se lo puede resumir apenas como un hombre sencillo y carismático con un gran sentido del gusto común. Aunque sea famoso en varios países, todavía está a salvo de actuar con esa amanerada sofisticación de los chefs que están moda o, al revés, con esa impostada sencillez de los cocineros que ostentan comer con las manos. Acurio no usa reloj, suele llevar las manos en los bolsillos y andar en jeans y camisas sueltas. Se le distingue sobre todo por su melena negra despeinada y un vientre de comensal experto que se resguarda del exceso. Si se hiciera un inventario de los lugares comunes sobre él, podría decirse que Acurio es tan carismático que no tiene enemigos. Tan carismático que en diciembre de 2013, en una encuesta de desempeño político e intención de voto, obtuvo un inesperado 47% de aprobación siendo el único personaje que no era político entre los que aparecían en la lista. Acaso era la prueba de cuán locos estaban todos en el Perú, o cuán urgidos de héroes, que podían imaginar a su primer chef como candidato a presidente.

¿Pero cuál es ese extraño poder que ha hecho que Gastón Acurio sea considerando en el Perú una suerte de nuevo prócer de la patria? Desde el sofá donde está sentado cuenta que un día el joven Acurio que llevaba cuarto años encerrado en el Astrid & Gastón siguiendo al pie de la letra las más pulidas técnicas y recetas de la cocina francesa, se tomó unas vacaciones e hizo un viaje por el Perú que le cambió la vida. Viajó por la costa, subió a los Andes y navegó los ríos del Amazonas. Conoció campesinos, agricultores, pescadores. En uno de esos encuentros llegó a unos campos de cultivo en Arequipa, en los Andes del sur. Hasta hoy recuerda que luego de charlar con el campesino este le mostró sus tierras sólo para explicarle que los frutos colgaban aún de las ramas y estaban a punto de echarse a perder. Por falta de recursos no iban a poder vender sus cosechas en los mercados de la zona.

Acurio ahora cuenta que ese viaje le hizo abrir los ojos. Fue un golpe de realidad. Entendió que era una torpeza que mientras él seguía obsesionado con Francia, poco sabía de las posibilidades que le ofrecían los insumos y las tradiciones culinarias de su propio país. Tras ese viaje volvió a su cocina a empezar otra vez. Comenzó a investigar ingredientes nativos, a rescatar las recetas tradicionales de la cocina peruana y a traerlas a la modernidad. Se dedico varios años a trabajar en silencio, a seguir viajando, a recorrer mercados y a buscar los secretos de las cocineras tradicionales. Acurio tuvo una idea: si los italianos invadieron con pizzas cada rincón del globo, por qué los ceviches no podrían convertirse en un fenómeno global. Pero no sólo se trataba de un asunto de identidad nacional, sino de una poderosa visión económica para desarrollar un país. “En los años ochenta –dice Acurio, mientras mueve las manos con la seguridad de un predicador– se inició el gran despegue de la cocina mexicana por el mundo. En aquel entonces habría unos quinientos restaurantes mexicanos: hoy debe haber más de doscientos mil. Con ello lograron poner de moda el tequila, la cerveza Corona, las salsas derivadas que hoy vemos en todos los supermercados y por supuesto el chile, al punto que hoy nuestro valle de Virú (en la costa norte) tiene que producir chile jalapeño porque el agro mexicano no es suficiente para abastecer la demanda mundial.
Con los japoneses sucedió lo mismo. A inicios de los ochentas no había sushi bares por el mundo. Hoy hay más de cincuenta mil y gracias a ellos pudieron entrar no sólo productos sino otros conceptos como el teppanyakki, del benihana, o los noodle bars tan de moda en Europa”. Si se conquista el mundo con una cocina, ¿acaso no se obtendrían suficientes beneficios directos e indirectos para que un país despegue?

 En 2006 dio un discurso en una universidad en Lima. Un discurso que se viralizó en redes sociales porque era el ideario de su propia revolución. Para entonces la capital del Perú se había convertido en la ciudad con más escuelas de cocina en el mundo y ochenta mil estudiantes de gastronomía querían ser el nuevo Acurio. Todavía nadie se había empalagado de su figura y estaban aún lejanas las críticas de sus detractores que llegarían años más tarde: “Un país en el que un cocinero-empresario es permanentemente consultado sobre política, sobre economía, sobre producción, sobre nutrición, sobre educación y sobre artes, propuesto para la presidencia y mencionado como la voz oficial del sentido común, como si el hecho de haber separado las papas fritas de la carne en el lomo saltado lo volviera un nuevo Leonardo, un país en el que eso sucede, digo, es un país que ha perdido groseramente la perspectiva de las cosas”, sentenciaría el escritor Gustavo Faverón.

Pero aún en 2006 su discurso fue aplaudido como la mirada de un cocinero que tenía un plan para cambiar el país para siempre. Así de ambicioso y nítido. Aquella noche dijo, frente a un auditorio repleto de estudiantes de economía y negocios: “si nos imaginamos un escenario de aquí a veinte años donde existan unos doscientos mil restaurantes peruanos de todo tipo y en todas partes, pues entonces deberemos imaginarnos todos los beneficios que aquel escenario traerá consigo.
 La demanda de productos tan comunes como papa amarilla, ají, cebolla roja, rocoto o limón se multiplicaría infinitamente y con ello acabaríamos por ejemplo con la pobreza del campesino peruano en los Andes”. Acurio decía que cocinar no era solo cocinar, hablaba de la gastronomía como un modo de conectar cadenas productivas, de crear una red desde el campo hasta, ya no la ciudad, sino la mesa del restaurante. Que la alta cocina no estuviera de espaldas al campesino, sino que se pudieran unir en un mismo proyecto.

El cocinero siguió: “si logramos poner de moda nuestra cocina se generarían también muchas industrias y productos de base de sabor, de salsas, de pisco, de libros, de revistas de turismo gastronómico, de asesoramiento gastronómico, de snacks y de todo aquello que va naciendo alrededor de conceptos como los que tenemos”. Si es cierto que Italia exporta ingredientes por cinco mil millones de dólares sólo porque un concepto llamado pizza existe por el mundo, “es fácil saber –añade Acurio– todo lo que podríamos generar con nuestra gama de conceptos culinarios peruanos. Aquello le daría a la marca Perú un poder de seducción que no solo llamaría la atención del publico internacional hacia otras propuestas peruanas como la moda, el diseño, la joyería, la música, la industria y demás sino que también incentivaría y activaría la creatividad y la confianza de nuestros jóvenes a crear conceptos propios y tener la valentía de salir al mundo con ellos”. Aquella noche Acurio fue aplaudido de pie aun cuando era difícil pensar que uno de sus aliados, el crítico gastronómico español Ignacio Medina, publicaría un libro titulado “Mamá, no quiero ser Gastón”. Fue el modo que encontró Medina de decirle con humor, a su buen amigo cocinero, la gastonización del Perú nos tiene a algunos un poco empachados.

***

Pase algunos años como profesor de una facultad de periodismo. Y ya para finales de la década del dos mil, se hacía común escuchar en los pasillos a los estudiantes de diferentes carreras decir sobre sus propias expectativas, cuando hablaban de su futuro: “quisiera ser el Gastón de la moda, el de la arquitectura, el Gastón del software, el del turismo, el del deporte”. Al tiempo que ese modelo suyo de emprendimiento y liderazgo contagiaba, también generaba frases irónicamente culinarias como “está Gastón hasta en la sopa” como señal de protesta contra su impronta. Algún detractor lo definió así: “Se le ha dotado de un aura extraña en la que parece reunirse el artista con el hombre práctico, el patriota con el negociante, el compadrito con el héroe y el visionario con el ejecutivo. Una especie de ser quimérico perfecto para estos tiempos donde los libros de cuentas son la literatura más popular: un artista que produce dinero”. Pero lo cierto es que en un país destruido durante los ochentas, sin futuro y sin héroes, que un cocinero se haya convertido en potencial candidato a presidente, dice quizá más de la escasez que dejan las guerras, que de la sabiduría popular y del fanatismo patriota que despertó. El Perú de hoy es distinto. Y los Acurios que sin querer serlo, ahora han despertado a un país que había estado muerto durante dos décadas, son los responsables de una explosión que ahora es también cultural. El cine renació, por ejemplo. De no tener industria ni salas de cine, hace tres años la película peruana Asu mare logró la cifra histórica de tres y medio millones de espectadores, y este año lo repitió con el estreno de la segunda parte. Era una película con un sentido del humor local, una comedia que reunía a todos los estereotipos de los años de la crisis, con un protagonista que pasaba de la juventud a la adultez. Una película simple, comercial, efectiva, sin mayor ambición artística que un guión muy empático, pero que revivió a toda una industria. Desde entonces más de una decena de películas peruanas llevaron caudales de espectadores. Unas más artísticas, unas más populares, pero todas con ambición de mantener vivo el interés por el cine local que había desaparecido. El teatro, la música, las artes plásticas, la moda, la literatura: todas recibieron algo de esa onda expansiva de optimismo que ha causado el boom de la cocina peruana, que se podría resumir en ese súbito interés por volver a mirar lo propio. De volver a leer, de leer a los nuevo escritores que quieren ahora narrar una historia que vaya más allá de la guerra, que supere ese pasado y que cuente también aquel nuevo país que ocurrió por sorpresa. Un país que parecía imposible. Un país que ahora es también más que un plato de ceviche. 

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