Virgilio Martínez and Pía León ― High cuisine

The young Virgilio Martínez wanted to become a chef mainly because it would broaden his horizons. “I wanted to travel the world,” he recalls. “I wanted to see different people and cultures, and one of the easiest ways to get access to money was by cooking.” As it turned out, back in the 1990s, learning the craft of cooking actually required travel. “In those days, Peru wasn’t a powerful country in gastronomy, so there weren’t any culinary schools,” he notes. “I had to go abroad to study.”

He went to Le Cordon Bleu in both Ottawa and London, graduating in 1998, and then spent the next decade working in fine-dining restaurants around the globe, from Lutèce in New York to Can Fabes in Catalonia. However, in 2009, with his wanderlust satiated (at least for the time being), he returned to Lima. What he discovered was a city, and a country, undergoing a culinary blossoming. Before he’d left, there had been no high-end dining to speak of; now he returned to what he calls “a boom in Peruvian gastronomy”.

Yet he felt that something was still missing from the culinary landscape of Lima. “Nobody was designing a restaurant based on anthropology, history and craft, taking into consideration how huge and biodiverse Peru is,” he explains. “Nobody was thinking about seasonality and ecosystems, or working in the Andes.” So, in 2009, Virgilio decided to launch his own restaurant in the Barranco neighbourhood of Lima, called Central and inspired by the Peruvian Andes, the Amazon and the country’s Pacific coastline. “I think it was quite different for a gastronomic experience,” he says, “not only in Peru, but around the world.” The accolades that Central has since garnered bear this out – in 2023, it was recognised as the best restaurant on the planet at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Awards.

Just as Central was getting off the ground, another ambitious Peruvian chef, Pía León, applied for a position in the kitchen. “I always knew I wanted to be a cook, since I was a child,” she says. “I finished school and straight away started studying cooking.” She got the position and eventually became head chef at Central. She and Virgilio also got more than they initially bargained for – soon afterwards, they got married. “When I interviewed her, it was a very professional interview,” says Virgilio today, with a warm smile. “I was nervous about moving to another job,” says Pía. “And I was nervous about opening a new restaurant,” Virgilio adds. “We were both focused on that.”

Fifteen years have since passed and, during that time, Virgilio and Pía have built an impressive gastronomic empire together. Central is still the flagship, but now another restaurant sits next door to it: Kjolle. Pía is now the head chef there and her culinary creativity has led to her being named the Best Female Chef in Latin America. As with Central, the menu and concept at Kjolle are designed to celebrate the diversity of Peruvian ingredients, but both are also inspired by Pía’s childhood memories. “My mum cooks really well, and I remember how every weekend, we would cook and share time together as a family,” Pía recalls. “That’s what made me want to become a cook myself.” The group has also expanded beyond Peru. In 2022, Virgilio and Pía launched a restaurant in Tokyo called MA Z, which this year won two Michelin stars, becoming in the process the first South American restaurant to achieve this recognition.

However, while the restaurant group’s beating heart is still Central, its spiritual home is arguably MIL, a property located 3,500 metres above sea level in the Sacred Valley of Peru, between the Andean city of Cusco and Machu Picchu. Here, Virgilio and Pía’s philosophy comes together most cohesively. The restaurant works in close collaboration with two indigenous communities based in the surrounding area – the Kacllaraccay and the Mullaka’s Misminay – and uses the crops they cultivate. “We depend on what they produce,” Virgilio explains. “So we’ve got to be extremely creative and careful about what’s going on on the land.”

He and Pía describe the restaurant as an “immersive experience”. Guests arrive a few hours before lunch and take a tour of the surrounding land, speaking with producers and farmers to understand how the entire ecosystem works and where the food comes from. “It’s about looking outside first, and then you go inside,” says Pía.

However, MIL didn’t start as a restaurant; it began as a research centre. “We needed to have another space, where we were able to speak about these altitude ecosystems,” says Virgilio, “because most of the vegetables, particularly the root vegetables, that we use in our restaurants come from the Andes.” So, he and his sister Malena, a scientist by trade, opened Mater, a research lab which describes itself as a seat of “learning, experimentation and cultural communication”. Here, a cross-disciplinary team of anthropologists, archaeologists, botanists, artists and linguists work together to preserve traditional ingredients and culinary techniques, and simultaneously develop new ways of working with the land and produce. However, in order to financially support the research arm, it was clear they needed to open a restaurant there as well.

“The idea was crazy,” says Pía. “I remember at the beginning, Malena and I listened to Virgilio say: let’s open a restaurant here. We were like, what?” It wasn’t just the fact that this was a long way away from their coastal roots in Lima. “The hardest thing about opening a restaurant here was connecting with the people and the communities,” she adds. “We have different customs, traditions and techniques. Everything was new.” They were initially met with a degree of scepticism by the local population, but Virgilio and Pía approached them with warmth and humility – as Virgilio puts it, “we are here to learn and to become good neighbours.” Today, the local producers and farmers are delighted to have MIL and Mater next door. “They’re very proud,” says Virgilio, “because they’re selling their food, they’ve increased their yields, everything they produce is consumed by the restaurants, and we also promote these ingredients to be sold in other places, in Cusco and Lima.”

Through this work, Virgilio has discovered a newfound mission in life. “When I was younger, I used to think: you open a successful restaurant, you get three Michelin stars and then you can close it and live off the money, travelling the world,” he says. “I was a bit stupid in those days.” Now, he, his wife Pía and his sister Malena (for this is truly a family affair) are driven by the “feeling of creativity and transcendence” that they get from the work, as well as the sense of purpose they find in leading a movement that is revolutionising global gastronomy, and bringing joy and opportunity to so many people. “It’s not difficult for me to imagine what I want to do over the next 20 years,” says Virgilio. “I’m going to continue with this.”

Clearly, it’s a bit too early for Virgilio and Pía to be seriously thinking about succession. Their son Cristóbal has, however, shown an early interest in cooking and the restaurant. “I don’t know if he’s going to be a chef, but he really enjoys food and he’s here pretty much every day,” says Pía. For Virgilio, this is a relief. “We work a lot,” he says, “so I’m really happy he enjoys being at the restaurant, because otherwise we wouldn’t see him so much.” But he’s less keen on the idea of Cristóbal eventually entering their profession. “Everyone sees the success, but not many see the level of commitment and the hours we spend here,” he notes. Instead, he wants to give his son something he didn’t have much of when he was a boy – those broad horizons that he had to become a chef to experience. “I would love to show him the world,” says Virgilio. “So he can see that there are other opportunities in life.”