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Lima / DPA
Astrid Gutsche actually only wanted to open one restaurant in the Peruvian capital Lima. Now, when asked how many restaurants she has around the world, she has difficulty remembering; “I don’t want to know, it stresses me out,” she says.
Her name and that of her husband Gaston Acurio are now a synonym for culinary excellence and a source of great pride in Peru.
The chefs attract hundreds of thousands of tourists to Lima. Gutsche and Acurio also try to be socially responsible by recruiting their kitchen staff from among Perus’ poorest people, including the indigenous population.
dpa met Astrid in “Tanta,” part of the couple’s bistro chain, which specializes in ceviche, raw fish with lime juice, chilli, sweet potatoes and roasted sweetcorn.
Born in the German city of Hamburg, Gutsche always loved Peru.
“My bedroom was a little haven of Indian things,” she says, adding that she wore ponchos and listened to music from the Andes.
When her family moved to Paris, she decided that she wanted to be either a chef or a dancer. Her love of cooking won out and at the renowned Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris she met Acurio.
“I didn’t know he was Peruvian (at first),” she says. They opened their first restaurant in 1994, calling it Astrid & Gaston.
Today they have 20 restaurants in Lima alone, including the Tanta bistros and the “Madame Tusan” chain, which combines Chinese and Peruvian cooking, and Gutsche also has her own chocolate range.
Around the world they have another 27 restaurants, from Miami to Madrid.
Gutsche, 45, now specializes in desserts and was chosen as best pastry chef at the Latin American chef awards in 2015; she spends up to three days travelling into the plantations of the Amazon in order to find the best cocoa for her truffles.
In fact, Lima has developed into one of the most exciting culinary centres in the world; “Central,” run by chef Virgilio Martinez was last year voted the best restaurant in Latin America, while Astrid & Gaston came in at number seven.
Gutsche is also extremely proud of the cooking school the pair sponsors in Pachacutec, 40 kilometres outside Lima in an area where poverty is rife.
The students pay just 120 soles (34 dollars) a month in fees, and a supermarket donates their food.
Around 20 of its graduates work in the couple’s kitchens, with one even having become head chef at their “La Panchita” restaurant in Lima.
More than 90 per cent of graduates find work, adds the school’s director, Karina Montes Bravo.
The school also trains up waiters and sommeliers and students study nutrition, maths, statistics and English. Some travel for up to three hours each way to get there, getting up at four in the morning.
“Gastronomy is used here as a social weapon,” says Bravo.
Today there are 18 students in the kitchen, studying how to make “lomo saltado,” a national dish made up of finely chopped beef marinated in soy sauce, flambeed with onions, tomatoes and chilis.
“Our food is a combination of so many cultures,” says 23-year-old Yvan Salguero, who says he used to watch his grandmother as she cooked and could never have afforded a traditional chef’s course.
His dream is to work in the three-Michelin-star Celler de Can Roca restaurant in Spain.
Gutsche says tears always come to her eyes when she comes here to teach – she loves to see the happy faces and the students’ ambition.
She spends her days at Tanta and her evenings in Astrid & Gaston and is rarely in bed before two or three.
In the mornings she goes dancing to relax.
She is fascinated by the fact that Peruvian cooking combines the many cultures of its immigrants – Chinese and Japanese influence is strong, for example, and ceviche is a Peruvian version of sushi.
“And everything possible grows here,” she adds. “We have all the vegetation zones.”
In Central, Martinez offers a menu that focuses on ingredients that come from high up in the mountains. This “3,900-metre” menu, for example, features white potatoes that only grow in the Andes.
Gutsche also impresses on her employees the importance of using fish from sustainable sources and that the kitchens should work together with smaller retailers.
“There didn’t used to be any appreciation of this whole treasure trove, this wealth of ingredients,” she explains. But now, she says, cooking is breaking down social barriers. “There’s now huge national pride in cooking, it’s fantastic.”
