Text by Lydia Itoi
Come to think of it, choosing a restaurant in a new city is a lot like going on a blind date. Restaurant blurbs read like dating app profiles: unnaturally brief, perky, and trying a bit too hard to seduce strangers. Both inevitably sound clichéd and reductive, no matter what they are describing.
Take Mérito’s restaurant profile. According to its listing on 50Best (currently #55 in the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list and #13 last year in Latin America),
“Mérito is a favourite in Lima’s already booming dining scene where Venezuelan chef Juan Luis Martínez combines his roots with Peruvian influences.”
How does that sound? Hot or not? Depends on whether the idea of fusion food or restaurant ranking is titillating or triggering.
Then there is the phone call from the matchmaking culinary magazine editor: “Oh, you’re going to Lima? You really should meet this amazing guy, Juan Luis Martínez. He’s brilliant, you are gonna love him. Let me set you two up…”
Juan Luis swipes right to an interview on short notice, and we arrange to meet for coffee at Demo, his artful café.
Demo began as a home delivery service during the Covid pandemic, sending out demo-tape samples of comfort food with Mérito’s sense of product to the locked-down public. Now located a few blocks from Mérito in the bohemian Barranco neighborhood of Lima, Demo has morphed into an all-day café serving artisanal French viennoiserie and sandwiches alongside classic yet elevated Venezuelan tequeños (fried cheese-stuffed bread rolls) and cachapas (sweet/savory corn pancakes).
Unlike 99% of blind dates, both Juan Luis and breakfast surpass expectations. It’s hard to say which is more gorgeously executed, his perfectly layered puff pastry or his cinema-star haircut.
But Juan Luis, it turns out, is also extremely shy, and at first conversation is slow going as we cast awkwardly around for something to talk about. He´d clearly prefer to let his work speak for itself. Good thing he has brought along his wife, Michelle, and two adorable young children. I am personally thrilled to see a chef who prioritizes family time. I chat easily with the friendly boy, who is about my daughter´s age, about football because he is wearing the same pink Messi shirt my daughter loves. Their two-year-old daughter is obsessed with crabs, so I show her some videos of red Sally Lightfoot crabs skittering comically over the black rocks of the Galapagos Islands. She watches, fascinated, with the solemn concentration of childhood.
The conversational ice cracks at last when I pick up the austere ceramic coffee cup and let my eyes enjoy its beautifully proportioned curves and feel its gentle warmth and weight in my palm. It is simple and small, but it has soul. Juan Luis follows my gaze, and I instantly know he is a fellow ceramic and design lover, not to mention probable coffee freak. In fact, he confides, he once considered taking up a pottery wheel before he chose the kitchen at the relatively late age of 27.
Objects and spaces have the power to connect, to attract, to spark creativity. He explains that the original cup was one of the design inspirations of Demo, and that his partner, designer Michelle Sikic of Astro Studio, did the interiors of both Demo and Clon, Mérito´s newly opened little sister restaurant.
In Juan Luis´ aesthetic universe, it is all in the details. Juan Luis met Michelle when he was looking for someone to design leather porte-additions for Mérito, and that is where their story began. Over the next few days as we explored his rapidly expanding Barranco domains, he would often run his hand over a reclaimed wooden bar stool upholstered in buttery topgrain leather or touch a lampshade made of a rolled-up menu and murmur, “Michelle designed this.” Like a talisman, he keeps a tiny but impeccably crafted leather wallet she made for him in his pocket.
Juan Luis may not talk much, but everything in his 3 restaurants tells a story revealing the way they relate to each other and to their clients, not only through food, but through the
environment they have created. Even the exposed 150-year-old adobe walls and cracked tile floors speak to those who will listen. It’s a joint labor of love through layers of time.
“Where are you from?”
Before I could stop myself, the dreadful chit-chat question slipped out, just when the conversation finally seemed to be going well. For just about anyone who has migrated any significant distance from the postal code of their birth, especially among people who do not share their language, skin color, or food, this question can stir up complicated feelings.
But Juan Luis answers “Venezuelan” without missing a beat. As a lifelong migrant myself who has lived in 6 countries since the age of 3, I envy his clarity. Once you cross the border, it is easy to lose sight of where you belong.
And it is also easy to categorize Mérito as “Venezuelan-Peruvian fusion” since Juan Luis is, after all, Venezuelan and has been living in Peru since 2014, when he came to work at Central. As a result of the ongoing economic and political crisis in their home country, the number of Venezuelan immigrants to Peru has swelled in the last decade to approximately 1.5 million, so the rise of a Venezuelan-Peruvian cuisine seems a natural enough outcome. Ever since the Spaniards landed in the 16th century, Peru has seen waves of immigrants, from Asia and Europe and Africa. Over time, it has successfully incorporated their foodways into its enormous pantry of endemic ingredients, creating one of the most dynamic cuisines in the world today. “Venezuela is the fifth wave of Peruvian fusion,” declares influential Lima-based, Spanish-born gastronomic journalist Ignacio Medina, lending his considerable gravitas to the subject.
But to pigeonhole the cooking at Mérito and its satellites, Clon and Demo, as simply “Venezuelan-Peruvian fusion” is to fall into an overly essentialist interpretation. Even that binomial nomenclature gives a false Linnean satisfaction of having pasted a label on a restaurant that actively defies labeling. It also paints an overly sunny, happy-clappy picture of the often messy process of cultural integration and identity-building.
It is a problematic time to identify as Venezuelan in Peru. Peruvians, at first sympathetic to the plight of their neighbors since they themselves have gone through periods of upheaval, have grown less welcoming as the crisis wears on into the biggest refugee migration in the history of the Americas. As of now, there is no end in sight. The ubiquitous Venezuelan Uber drivers in Peru, their cars still vividly painted with anti-Maduro slogans, are despondent about the results of the July 28 elections. There will be another huge influx of Venezuelan Uber drivers on the streets of Lima soon.
The Encuesta Nacional de Hogares (national household survey) officially regards all Venezuelans residing in Peru to be forcibly displaced persons for statistical purposes. Of the 1.5 million Venezuelan newcomers, half live below the poverty line and only 12% are on the rosters as being employed in the formal economy. In a recent Saveur magazine article about the restaurants in Peru run by Venezuelan immigrants, mostly street stalls and arepa counters, it expresses surprise at the “unexpectedly refined” dishes at Mérito.
But even if the Peruvian statistics bureau and the UN Refugee Agency consider Juan Luis a forcibly displaced Venezuelan, his personal lived experience is hardly representative of that of the vast majority of his Venezuelan-Peruvian compatriots, and neither is his cooking. “I left Venezuela not because of a bad situation, but to expand my horizons and see what was out there,” he says. He left Venezuela in 2011 at the beginning of the white-collar and professional flight from the Bolivarian revolution, but that was more of a coincidence. Like so many young chefs, he looked to Spain and France for further culinary development. He was fortunate that his family was willing and able to support him while he searched for his path in life.
The Venezuelan label also masks the fact that he has spent a significant portion of his formative years outside Venezuela, even before his European culinary training. He has fond memories of boyhood summers with his grandfather in Catalunya, fishing for octopus and riding his bike along the genteel beach of S’Agaró. He went to high school and college in the US, where he studied communications. He also belongs to that first generation of middle-class kids influenced by bigger-than-life American TV chefs like Paul Prudhomme and Emeril (“BAM!”) Lagasse.
Frankly, it’s not clear whether another binomial label, “fine dining,” fits either in a place with such an intimate and casual vibe. Is it fine dining if we are building our own sandwiches on bar stools right next to the pass? Does it really matter? At Mérito, we belly up to the “chef’s table,” AKA the downstairs bar, to share plates of technically and visually brilliant food while police sirens and girls hanging out of limos scream past outside. The dissonance between the highly executed dishes and the laid-back bohemian attitude is lost in a happy haze of delicious contentment, washed down with excellent drinks, alcoholic and not. (Juan Luis himself does not drink.) There is no tasting menu at Mérito as of yet, although I understand it´s under consideration. And although Clon next door is meant to be the more casual of the two, the informal urban artsy ambience, muted natural tones, and sharing plate format really is a clone of Mérito. Even the street theater of police sirens and partying limo girls is the same. Most importantly, the same incredibly unctuous Mérito flan is available at both.
This androgynous quality probably comes from the fact that when he left Central after years of burning himself out in haute cuisine kitchens, Juan Luis envisioned opening a cool, modern arepera. However, he realized the energy and design of the restaurant space were asking for something more elevated.
The arepa he serves on the Mérito menu is so elevated that it practically floats, magically puffed like a balloon. It also happens to be one of the most delicious things I have eaten in my life, and I’m craving it hard right now. It comes with slices of fired pork belly lacquered with sachatomate (tree tomatoes) and crisp slices of pickled sundried zapallo (pumpkin) and yacón (daisy root). The idea is to make a kind of DIY sandwich, slathering on herbed avocado sauce and butter infused with chicha de jora (germinated corn beer fermented in clay jars). This is a far cry from the typical Venezuelan arepa, which is a hockey puck-sized cake of pre-cooked ground cornmeal toasted on the griddle, its gummy center usually hollowed out afterwards for stuffing.
The Mérito arepa could arguably be the poster child of the nouvelle vague of Venezuelan-Peruvian fusion, but it is also a product of the much more complex cross-pollination that occurs in today´s kitchens in the age of social media. The idea for the puffed arepa came from his sister, who puffs them in the oven rather than in the deep fryer. The sun-dried pickled zapallo and yacón were inspired by watching a YouTube video of Alain Ducasse learning about kiriboshi daikon (sun-dried giant radish) in Tokyo. Infusing butter with a reduced acid is a tip he picked up from an Italian chef when they were both working at Martín Berasategui in Spain.
Another popular dish features grilled corn ribs, a David Chang/Momofuku idea that went viral on TikTok a few years ago, served with an addictive dipping sauce of natillas (Venezuelan sour cream), grated fresh llanero cheese, chulpi (toasted corn kernels), ají, and huacatay mint that will almost surely inspire someone else.
“Cocina del autor,” the idea of creative, individualistic cuisine of a chef as author, is a flexible label that would seem to best describe what is going on at Merito, as long as one does not fall into the fallacy of presuming that any dish can be the pure invention of an individual creator, springing out like Athena in all her glory, fully formed from the head of Zeus.
Nearly every dish alludes to something, seasoned with memories and impressions, hidden like coded secret messages. The connection between the ideas can be tenuous. The popeye crab tartlet is a masterful showcase of Latin American ingredients—mamey and its leaves, cocona, zapallo, macambo, a unique sweet-sour honey from stingless Mayan melipona bees–and was inspired by Thai tom yum. If you take a bite and close your eyes, you could suddenly be in Bangkok. Another outstanding dish, a róvalo-kiwicha white fish ceviche sandwiched between a quinoa crisp and a marinated slice of yacón daisy root powdered from red to yellow, is pure Peruvian dressed in a Rothko color field painting. Tongues of rich, buttery Pacific sea urchin float in a sauce based on the herbs traditionally used in pachamanca firepit cooking. The panipuri bread that accompanies the fish curry reminds him of the chewy texture of the tequeños in the school cafeteria. My Venezuelan husband laughs at the school lunch memory, but even some of the Venezuelan references are obscure for him.
A cornucopia of South American products like yacón, cocona, dale dale, sanki, tumba, sachatomate, cushuru, and a multicolored collection of potatoes and ears of corn decorates the counter. Besides being a vivid splash of color, they serve as useful specimens to explain unfamiliar ingredients to first-time visitors like me. After several weeks of traveling all over the country, I am amazed at the wealth and variety of Nature’s gifts. It seems like everything fights diabetes and high blood pressure and hair loss. I should definitely spend more time here.
However, I am grateful that Juan Luis does not attempt to make himself out to be the culinary Hiram Bingham of the Andes and the Amazon, “discovering” exotic new ingredients that have been known to native peoples all along. In fact, many of these ingredients can be easily found in local markets, or have been cultivated for hundreds of years–they are new only to outsiders like me. Also, when he uses an ingredient, it is not to win cultural diversity brownie points. Its flavor and the culinary logic for it to be there are obvious. Neither does he make I-dare-you-to-eat-this avant-garde food that gastro tourists post to their Instagram on their first visit and never eat again. Mérito is an ideal place to feel at home with the flavors of the continent.
Juan Luis’ culturally eclectic vernacular governed by a devotion to the beauty and pleasure principle brings to mind Dabiz Muñoz’s DiverXo in Madrid, where he also staged before going to Central. It also reminds me of the first iteration of Saison in San Francisco, circa 2010-11, a ramshackle former stable in the Mission where a young Josh Skenes literally lit a fire under the local dining scene with pristine and often unfamiliar ingredients imaginatively prepared.
Mérito might be getting international attention now, but Juan Luis’ real objective is to create a cool local joint. His first concern is making food delicious enough to bring people back, and it is impressive how many regulars stop by to say hello before heading to their tables upstairs.
As we walk the streets of Barranco past the street musicians and the hipster bars and art galleries, visiting the new pizza joint he is helping to launch and discussing ideas to create a coworking space for creatives anchored by Demo, I can see that he is at home for now, in his element after a long spiritual journey. By chance Michelle drives by as we are walking through the palm-lined municipal park of Barranco, crowned with a beautiful 100-year-old public library. Juan Luis quickly liberates their daughter from her car seat so that she can perch on his shoulders. Knowing your roots matters, of course, but so does finding your place in the sun and your purpose in life.
The restaurant is called “Mérito” not because it seeks accolades, but as a personal challenge to meaningful action. As in music and art, culinary creative expression comes in many shades and genres, not necessarily staying in the lines, but constantly flowing.
