Shepherd Neame Celebrates Movember With A Hare-Raising Toast

Words and Photography by Matthew Brown, Luiz Hara & Bearded Robin

To celebrate the start of Movember - an annual event dedicated to improving men’s health - The London Foodie was invited to the Dickensian Old Doctor Butler’s Head pub in the City of London, for a preparatory shave, and the chance to try a food-and-beer pairing menu organised by Britain’s oldest brewer, Shepherd Neame.

Before the Movember-themed meal - featuring everything from razor clams and hare pie - had even begun, I was whisked into the barber’s chair for a cut-throat shave by the talented Paul Dos Reis of the Genco Male Grooming. Thankfully, this terrifying experience was accompanied by a cold glass of Spitfire Gold - the new star of the Shepherd Neame empire.

Spitfire Gold was launched early this year, 25 years after the original Spitfire was first brewed in memory of The Battle of Britain. True to its name, this really is a vibrantly golden beer. From that amber complexion comes a malty butterscotch aroma, and sweet citrus notes balanced by astringent pine.

This rounded and satisfying beer was so good that it was served again with the first course, a jar of “shaved courgette and goatee cheese parcels”. Though they were served from a pickle jar, the parcels were delicate, with the sweet juice softening the sourness of the goat’s cheese and making for a filling but moreish starter.

They were followed by a course of ‘razor clams and angel hair pasta’, and another beer from the Shepherd Neame portfolio: a Whitstable Bay Pale Ale. Pale Ales are popular for their light body and citrus aromas, and this light, grassy variety is one of the best of the bunch, and fortunately it is easy to find in supermarkets! True to their seaside origins, Shepherd Neame paired the Pale Ale with razor clams so thick and plump that it was impossible to believe that they’d made it all the way to the City of London so fresh.

Things became altogether much heavier with main course and dessert, a ‘hare and Spitfire ale pie’ followed by a ‘sticky stubble pudding’. These were great versions of pub classics, and I highly recommend hare instead of beef for a richer ale pie. These heavy dishes needed a strong match, and we opted for the Shepherd Neame Master Brew, a mid-brown bitter with a darker colour and weightier scents of toffee.

Shepherd Neame proved the diversity of their selection, finding a beer pairing for everything from razor clams to toffee pudding. Look out for Spitfire Gold and Whitstable Bay Pale Ale at the supermarket, and if you’re inspired by their punning menu you can even visit their website to design and suggest your own beer.

Nikkei Recipe - Salmon Tiradito with Passion Fruit and Aji Amarillo Tiger's Milk

My cookbook 'Nikkei Cuisine: Japanese Food the South South American Way' was recently published by Jacqui Small. It was a hectic but incredible time writing this book, which saw me travelling to Peru, Brazil and Europe to research it. I learnt a great deal about Nikkei life and cuisine and some touching stories about my own family I never knew. The book is a personal collection of over 100 recipes ranging from family favourites to contributions by Japanese and Nikkei Michelin-starred restaurants I visited during my research trips.

I will be sharing with you in the coming 12 weeks, 12 recipes from the Nikkei cookbook and I hope they will encourage you try cooking Nikkei at home. If you try one of these recipes I would be keen to hear your thoughts.

Thanks and enjoy!

Salmon and Passion Fruit Tiradito
Crispy Butternut Squash, Espelette Pepper

The world is your oyster when it comes to seasoning Tiradito. Much as I love using lime as a major component for Leche de Tigre, there is a whole range of different fruits to play with. Here, I use passion fruit and aji amarillo (Peruvian yellow chilli) to create a zingy, punchy dressing that works really well with the fatty salmon. Finish the dish with a dusting of fine Espelette pepper for a gentle, fruity hint of chilli.

Serves 4

200g sushi-graded salmon fillet, skinned
½ butternut squash 
Sunflower oil for deep-frying
a few sprigs of chervil (or coriander)

For the passion fruit Leche de Tigre (Tiger’s Milk):
4 small passion fruit, juice and seeds (around 50g in total)
1 teaspoon of aji amarillo paste
1 lemon, juiced (60ml)
¼ teaspoon of salt
1 clove garlic, cut 
1cm slice of ginger
1 tbsp mirin
1 tbsp sugar
¼ banana shallot, very finely chopped
2 tbsp of chervil, very finely chopped (or coriander)

A sprinkle of Espelette pepper (can substitute with sichimi pepper)
A sprinkle of Maldon salt flakes

Make the passion fruit leche de tigre by whizzing all the ingredients (except the shallot and chervil, and 1-2 tablespoons of passion fruit seeds to be reserved for the presentation) in a food processor. Pass it through a fine sieve, add the finely chopped shallot and chervil. Refrigerate until needed.

Peel the butternut squash. Using a zester, cut fine strips of squash rather like spaghetti. Line a plate with absorbent paper. Add sunflower oil to a pan and heat to 140°C (note – use a deep pan and do not fill more than 1/3 full as the hot oil will rise to the surface as the squash is added). Fry the butternut squash spaghetti for about 1 minute until lightly browned, transfer to the lined plate. The squash strands will not be crispy at this stage but do not worry – they will crisp up as they cool down. Season with sea salt.

Remove any residual brown flesh from the salmon fillet. Cut the salmon into thin slices and arrange them in a single row over each of the four serving plates. For each plate, spoon 2 to 3 tablespoons of the passion fruit leche de tigre over the salmon, dot with a few passion fruit seeds around the plate, arrange a line of crispy butternut squash spaghetti in the middle of the salmon row, and scatter a few sprigs of chervil (or coriander) over the squash and on the plate. Sprinkle some Maldon sea salt flakes and Espelette pepper. Serve immediately.

If you would like to purchase a copy of this book, it is on sale on Amazon here. Alternatively, if you are visiting my supper club, you can purchase a signed copy here.

Top Notch Dim Sum, Champers and Cocktails - My Kind of Sunday Lunch at Hakkasan Hanway Place

Name: Hakkasan Hanway Place (Dim Sum Sunday)

Where: 8 Hanway Place, London, W1T 1 HD, 
http://hakkasan.com/locations/hakkasan-hanway-place/

Cost: Dim Sum Sunday menus at Hakkasan Hanway Place are priced at £58 (‘Signature’ menu including ½ bottle of Champagne plus 2 cocktails per person) and £48 (Classic and Vegetarian menus – includes no Champagne, but offers unlimited Taiwanese tea plus 1 cocktail). The food offering is the same between the two non-vegetarian menus, the only difference being the drinks.

About: Regular readers will know I've long been a fan of Hakkasan's dim sum, so I was chuffed to return to try their new Dim Sum Sunday Signature menu, launched in October 2015.

Served from midday until 6.45pm, Hakkasan’s ‘Signature’ set menu includes a pre- and a post- dinner cocktail, and a ½ bottle of Louis Roederer Brut Premier NV Champagne per person. The food menu features a salad starter, a range of 8 different dim sum (4 steamed and 4 baked/fried), two main courses with an accompanying vegetable dish and fried rice and a dessert. For the Sunday dim sum service, the restaurant employs a DJ who selects a range of lounge- style music well suited to the day after a late Saturday night.

What We Ate: The menu started with a refreshing salad of crispy duck served with pomelo, pine nuts, shallot and a mix of green leaves and cress. Seasoned with a sweet and lightly tart dressing, with warm slivers of duck meat, it made for a delicious start to our meal.

Next up was the dim sum. This included the steamed morsels har gau (shrimp dumplings), scallop shumai, Chinese chive dumplings (a personal favourite), and duck and yam bean dumplings. The pastry was light and delicate as only top quality dim sum are. They were freshly made using great ingredients, and well seasoned.

Equally good were the roast and baked dim sum which included royal king crab and truffle roll, a sumptuous buttery baked venison puff, smoked duck and pumpkin puff in a beautiful pumpkin-shaped pastry case, and golden radish with crab meat pastry.

For our mains, there were two – a delectable lettuce wrap of finely cubed seafood and water chestnut in XO sauce, and also a stir-fry of black pepper rib eye beef with an unctuous merlot sauce. The beef, a Hakkasan signature dish, was meltingly tender and very richly flavoured and as good as I remember from when I first tried a few years ago.

To accompany we had a platter of tender green asparagus, with ginger and spring-onion fried rice.

For dessert, we opted for the apple tatin, with vanilla ice cream, caramel and calvados. I love serving a traditional French tarte tatin at my supperclub, but Hakkasan’s version was something else.  With the lightest of pastry topped with layer after layer of fine caramelized apple slivers, this was a very refined interpretation of a French classic.

The Jivara Bomb was another beautiful dessert combining a praline of hazelnut encased in rice crispies and topped with a warm milk chocolate sauce.

What We Drank: We were chuffed to meet the charming Jefferson Coltro, a fellow Brazilian and Hakkasan’s head bartender, during our visit. Jefferson took his time explaining to us, the various cocktails on the menu (all alcoholic options are priced at £12.50) and below are some of his suggestions.

The Morello Collins blended cherry, almond, Tanquery No. 10 gin, lemon and Peychaud's bitters, and was light and refreshing. The Hakushu Crush had a bracing combination of one of my favourite fruits, the kumquat, with Japanese yuzu, Suntory Hakushu 12 year old whisky, Drambuie, ginger and cardamom bitters. I really enjoyed this cocktail, generously laced with whisky and some wonderful citrus notes.

Jefferson Coltro recommended a third cocktail which we found hard to resist - the Amer l'Orange. Made with Grey Goose l'orange vodka, Amer Picon (a French aperitif combining orange, quinine and cinchona and genetian), lemon, cinnamon and cranberry – a magnificent cocktail, it had a good hit of alcohol with bittersweet citrus flavours. I loved it. The menu also includes 1/2 bottle of Louis Roederer per person, and as there were two of us, we shared a full bottle!

With our desserts we had two other cocktails - the Mayahuelo was made from Del Maguey Vida mescal tequila, Antica Formula vermouth, apricot brandy, almond syrup and lime. Strong, smoky and flavourful, this was a great cocktail to finish our meal. The Charantais Toddy, ordered to accompany the tarte tatin, was served warm, combining Hennessy Fine de Cognac with cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, it sent us into the chill November late afternoon with a soothing glow.

Likes: Dim sum of the highest quality, stunningly presented, cool vibe courtesy of the resident DJ, great cocktails, generous Louis Roederer Champagne offering. Excellent value.

Dislikes: None.

Verdict: The Dim Sum Sunday Signature menu at Hakkasan offers excellent Chinese fine dining at one of the most glamorous venues in London. A personal favourite, and at £58 including two cocktails and half a bottle of Louis Roederer Champagne per person thrown in, as well as plenty of delicious food, it is probably the best value for money menu in London right now. I can’t wait to return. Very highly recommended.

L'Anima - Italian Cooking with Soul

By Marina Benjamin

Name: L’Anima

Where: 1 Snowden Street, London, EC2A 2DQ - www.lanima.co.uk

Cost: Starters cost £14-£26. Primi are £13-£26 and secondi are £16 to £38. Desserts are £7-£13.50. A meal for two from the à la carte menu with wine is roughly £150.

About: When Californian property developer and first-time restaurateur Peter Marano opened L’Anima in 2009, the City was in the depths of recession, and Marano joked that in lieu of bankers wining and dining on their bonuses, insolvency specialists would eat there. What he didn’t count on was that other professionals living and working on the Shoreditch-City border, where L’Anima occupies an out-of-the-way nook, would flock to the place. They were lured by tales of excellent southern Italian food, all of it finely wrought but without losing any of its ‘soul’ (‘l’Anima’ is Italian for soul). Since then L’Anima has gone from strength to strength, now with Sardinian chef Lello Favuzzi heading up the kitchen, mixing ingredients and flavours from Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria and Puglia, and, if he’s in the mood, adding a Moorish twist.

The vibe at L’Anima is white: white floors, white walls, white tables, white chairs. And yet somehow it is not in the least clinical. L’Anima may look austere, but its feel is distinctly welcoming – like Warren Beaty’s paradise in the movie Heaven’s Gate. There’s warm lighting, vast windows, a moody, mirrored bar and friendly, informal staff: sitting in L’Anima you feel uplifted rather than cleansed. And the transport begins when you sample the bone dry Aneri house Prosecco (£9 per glass), accompanied by a homely bread basket and succulent green olives from Puglia.

What We Had: We sampled seven dishes from Chef Lello’s then new autumn menu, many of them light and maritime – as if still clinging to the last days of summer. But to kick off we tried a winter warmer: two beetroot tortelli, huddled in the middle of a vast plate, and twisted up with small cuts of yellow turnip, a few leaves of wilted spinach and fried sage. The dish was almost too beautiful to eat, but the tasting was as good as the looking. Inside the pillowy soft pasta parcels was a smoky burrata filling perfectly set off by a balsamic reduction. To cut the richness, we had a glass of crisp 2014 Vermentino from Isola dei Nuraghi (£6.20).

A medley of fish dishes followed. Grilled octopus with smoked aubergine purée, and crumbled ricotta mustia (£16.50) was paired with a Terre Nobili made from the Greco grape (£10.50). This had a strong scent of sherry on the nose and was robust enough to stand up to the earthy notes of the dish.

A sublime plate, in which a couple of melt-in-the-mouth Mazara prawns, grapefruit and burnt leek, accompanied a generous dollop of creamy stracciatella (£15.00), was paired with a buttery, apple-scented chardonnay from Puglia, called Pietrabianca (£13.50). In other hands this dish might have easily not worked. Add watercress oil and smoky grated Sardinian bottarga, and you’ve got a formidable number of ingredients in play. But it is a testimony to Lello’s talent that it achieved harmony and balance.

The final ‘starter’ was a dish of Malloredus (a traditional Sardinian pasta dish) and blue lobster in a delicate shellfish broth, dotted with pointy, seared florets of Romanesco cauliflower (£17.50). Malloreddus is more like gnocci than pasta, and its black colour derives from the ‘burnt flour’ that is left after the rest of the wheat has been used up. After the big flavours of the tortelli and octopus, this was a delicate and homely offering. It tasted of the sea. With it, we drank a pleasantly floral Bardolino rosé from the Veneto (£8.50).

The meat offering was a slow-cooked piece of pig cheek coated in a jus that had been reduced down to rich, glossy perfection to deliver a deep, meaty kick (£21.50). The yin and yang of the dish was achieved with celeriac purée and a tasty smear of sweet Mirto reduction (a Sardinian liqueur ). It was properly autumnal and hearty. The red wine that Sommelier Gian Marco chose to accompany the pork was complex and more-ish; a 2013 Aglianico “Core”, that sells for £14 a glass. A little of this wine goes a long way, but I could happily have taken my time with a bottle.

To finish off our meal, which left us sated but not uncomfortably full, we had some punchy hazelnut gelato, made that morning and whipped to the texture of a cloud. And we tasted the Amalfi lemon soufflé, another airy confection, but this time we poured hot and spicy molten chocolate into its middle. It hit the register on all counts: tart, bitter, sweet and chilli. A perfect end to the meal.

Likes: Unpretentious refinement and food to remember. A modestly sized wine list from small producers across the country (the cellar, in fact, is organized regionally, so you can trace a circuit from north to south Italy) offers wine not just by the glass but for very reasonable prices by the carafe as well.

Dislikes: There’s not much to cavil about.. This is food that deserves to be enjoyed more widely. Shoreditch, are you still listening?

Verdict: Chef Lello’s take on Sardinian and Puglian fare has all the warmth and flavour of southern home cooking, but with a finesse that comes from true artistry. Highly recommended.

How to Host a Great Dinner Party - My Top Tips!

Below is a fun article I wrote on how to host a great dinner party for Heathrow Express for their 15-minute series, some useful tips (I hope!) on how to be the host(ess) with the most(ess)!

If you enjoy entertaining, having friends round for dinner is perhaps one of the best ways to spend an evening. But for the uninitiated, what starts as a bit of fun can quickly turn into a logistical nightmare. We asked chef and supper club expert Luiz Hara to dish up his secrets. 

15 minutes – that's all it takes to get between Heathrow and central London on our high speed train services. It got us thinking… what else can you do in 15 minutes? This issue: Host a great dinner party

Continue to read here:

https://www.heathrowexpress.com/news/2015/09/02/15-minutes-to-host-a-great-dinner-party

The London Foodie Goes to Peru - Lima (Part 2) - Miraflores

During the second part of our visit to Lima, we stayed in Miraflores. To learn more about Lima’s other boroughs including Barranco and San Isidro, and hotel and restaurant recommendations in these areas, read Part 1 here.

Miraflores is close to Barranco in northern Lima, and is the destination of choice for international visitors to the capital as well as well-heeled locals.

This is hardly surprising given its extensive Pacific coastline, the excellent hotels and restaurants in the area, the buzz from its many shops, bars and cafes, and its safety in comparison to older and more central parts of the capital.

Lima has always been known locally as the Garden City, and no district rivals Miraflores when it comes to parks. The Miraflores government has spent years improving and adding to the district's green spaces, with a special emphasis on El Malecón, a six-mile stretch of parks situated along the cliffs high above the Pacific Ocean. So it was to Miraflores that we headed for the last two days of our stay in Peru.  

Where to Stay

JW Marriott Hotel Lima

The JW Marriott Group is one of my favourite international hotel collections, and one I always seek out when travelling. It’s a group that I know has a real focus on providing excellent service and strives to stay ahead of the game – I recently did some consultancy for the group helping them design a hotel room for the future, leading the ‘foodie financials’, along with four other influencers representing their own ‘tribes’ –fashion, IT, sports and luxury. The best attributes of each tribe were subject to a public vote to create ideas for the perfect Marriott hotel room. You can read more about that in this article on the Daily Mail here.

The Marriott Hotel Lima, Peru

The JW Marriott Hotel Lima is a modern 5 star hotel, spectacularly situated on a cliff-top overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It had all the comfort and luxury expected of this top international hotel brand, as well as impeccable service.

The hotel affords great views of the ocean and is very well located in front of the Larcomar, a busy waterfront shopping and restaurant complex built into the cliff in Miraflores. The extensive promenade (known as the Malecón) is a lovely spot to stroll along, watching the many locals going about their daily lives, skating, jogging and cycling.

View of our room of the Pacific coast from the Marriott Hotel Lima

Our room had an ocean-front view, was spacious and elegant if a tad corporate in feel. It was the perfect spot to go back to after a day of eating, shopping and visiting the capital.

What made it even better for us was that I am a member of the  Marriott’s Rewards Club Scheme and so had access to the Executive Lounge on the top floor of the hotel.

The Executive Lounge is available to those staying on certain room rates and members of the Executive Club Scheme. It offers food, coffee and drinks 24 hours a day all inclusive in the room rate at no extra charge, and a concierge service which is a great help for restaurant reservations and flight check-ins. The staff at the Executive Lounge (as well as in other parts of the hotel) were super-helpful to us during our stay, making numerous calls on our behalf to arrange meetings and reservations. We had breakfast and various snacks during the day as well as cheese, charcuterie and wine at sunset each day.

The hotel has a very well equipped gym and an open-air swimming pool which, though it looked quite tempting, sadly we did not have time to make use of during our short stay.

On our first morning we had breakfast at the hotel’s main restaurant. With various cooking stations serving an array of hot dishes including pancakes, waffles and local dishes cooked to order (the eggs Benedict with crumbled chorizo was delicious) as well as fresh tropical fruit and everything else you might expect, breakfast was a real feast.

The JW Marriott in Lima is a well-appointed hotel in a great location, with spacious rooms and stunning public areas. In addition, with great food and service, it is a good and convenient place to stay in Miraflores, either for pleasure or business. 

Where to Eat

Central Restaurant by Virgilio Martinez is just around the corner from the JW Marriott Hotel. We had an epic 17-course tasting menu there which will be featured in a separate blog post.

Fiesta Restaurant

Fiesta is one of the top restaurants in Lima, and in 2015 was placed at number 31 of the San Pelligrino Best 50 Restaurants in South America. Its Head Chef, Hector Solis, aims to present gourmet food from the Chiclayo region of Northern Peru.

We started with grilled ceviche over corn leaves (£15). The ceviche had a delectably charred flavour having been grilled on corn-husks over hot coals, and it was served with a well flavoured cream of aji amarillo, and topped with chopped coriander, aji limo (the red chilli used for ceviches), and chicha de jora (a Peruvian beer made of corn).

Next came grilled baby goat ribs, served with on a bed of tacu-tacu rice (£13), with white beans. Tacu-tacu is a national dish of rice usually mixed with black or brown beans, to accompany meats. The ribs were meltingly tender, and served with a delicious salsa of Seco Norteño made from northern Peruvian squash and coriander.

The piece de resistance was undoubtedly the main course, and the dish for which Fiesta is most famous: Arroz con Pato (£13). A classic Peruvian-Chiclayo dish, Fiesta’s version was beautifully presented in its own cooking pot and featured black duck from the El Conde hacienda in northern Peru, fed on a diet of fresh vegetables and yellow corn. The meat was tender, richly flavoured and succulent. The accompanying rice was fragrant with coriander and Peruvian squash, laced with duck stock, and served with a refreshing salad of radish, red onions and red chilli, and a cream of aji amarillo.

For dessert, we shared a well-made Suspiro de Lúcuma. This was a custard made from the delicious eponymous Amazonian fruit native to Peru, topped with soft meringue and lime zest.

Our meal at Fiesta was delicious, with hearty home-style Peruvian food cooked to Michelin standards. This is the kind of food and cooking I love. Fiesta was one of my favourite restaurants during this trip, and I would highly recommend it for a taste of authentic, regional Chiclayo cooking.

Saqra

Saqra is an unusual restaurant for a number of reasons, and the literal translation of its Quechua name is 'little devil'. Set in a building that dates from 1971, it was opened in 2011 by its current owner Joaquin de la Piedra after thorough renovation. 

It is a quirky, colourful restaurant in the heart of Miraflores, with outdoor seating, making it a great place to hang out for a few drinks and some food. Unusually, everything in the restaurant is for sale – not just the food and drink, but also everything from the marble-topped tables to the artwork and lights, crockery and cutlery.

We kicked off with a refreshing Chiclano aperitif made from Pisco and ginger ale, while the owner explained that he aimed to serve Peruvian food as it had long been enjoyed- simple, made on the premises and served without frills.  

Our first dish was a beautifully presented bonito tataki (£6) – tataki referring to the Japanese method of searing the outside of the fish while keeping the inside raw.  The bonito had been covered with burnt sugar and flamed, and was served with leche de tigre (ceviche marinade) and huacatay oil.

Next we had a platter of black pudding squares (£6), coated in panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried. Served over a sweet potato crunch and covered with Saqra’s interpretation of chimichurri sauce, made with aji amarillo, red onion and lime, it offered a mouth-tingling contrast to the richness of the black pudding.

We also had a dish of pansotti (£7), similar to ravioli, these were filled with a ratatouille made from Andean roots, peppers, ulluco (a tuber vegetable from the Andes similar to potato), maca (a powdered root aka ‘Peruvian viagra’ or ‘superfood’), white onion, parsley, huacatay and muña herbs. Served in a creamy goats cheese sauce with dehydrated beetroot, this was delicious, and one of the best dishes of the evening.

The osso bucco de seco (£10) was tender and succulent, having been cooked sous vide for 24 hours. The meat came with a flavoursome Peruvian ‘seco’ (a Northern Peruvian sauce) of coriander, loche squash and chicha de jora, garnished with creamy mashed yucca, loche squash foam and salsa criolla.

The escabeche with chickpea tacu tacu (£8.50) followed. This was a fillet of bonito, marinated in vinegar, red onion and white chilli for 3 days, served over a creamy chickpea tacu tacu (a Peruvian dish normally made from rice and beans topped with roasted meat).

For dessert, we tried the pineapple picarones with fig syrup and coconut ice cream £6. Picarones are Peruvian doughnuts made from a dough of pumpkin and sweet potato. I fell in love with picarones during my stay in Peru, so was happy to see them on the menu at Saqra. Here, they were stuffed with pineapple, covered with fig and chancaca (molasses) syrup and served with a smooth coconut ice cream and an air-dried pineapple slice.

We thoroughly enjoyed our meal at Saqra. I loved the bold flavours, the beautiful presentation of the dishes, and the tongue-in-cheek, quirky feel of the restaurant. A great, fun dining spot in Miraflores. 

What to Do

Paragliding on the Malecón & Bike Tour

Besides strolling, jogging, cycling or people watching along the extensive beach-front avenue known as the Malecón, it is also the taking-off point for paragliders. A few minutes north of Parque del Amor (Love Park), you will see the taking-off point for paragliders.

The Malecón is the prime spot for paragliding in Lima — gliders jump off the cliffs and ride the winds whipping off the ocean below. For $50, you can take a 10-minute flight with a trained paragliding guide; buy tickets at the small kiosk at Block 2 of the Malecón. Rides are available from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, winds permitting.

If you want more than 10 minutes of fun, rent a bike and cruise the Malecón and other sites in Lima. A good place for rentals is Bike Tours of Lima at Bolivar 150 in Miraflores. The daily rate, which includes lock and helmet, is $15.

Hanging out and people watching at the Larcomar 

Along the Malecón in the Miraflores district is Larcomar, a multilevel entertainment, food and shopping complex. The first thing you'll notice about Larcomar is that you cannot see it. The entire complex is built into the cliffside, underneath Miraflores — the entrance is on Block 6 of Malecón de la Reserva, across the street from the JW Marriott hotel; take the stairs down just before you get to the cliff's edge.

Larcomar has breathtaking ocean views, which you can enjoy from numerous restaurants offering Peruvian food, as well as several American franchises serving everything from doughnuts to ribs. Try Peruvian chargrilled chicken — or pollo a la brasa (literally, chicken over coals) — at Pardo's Chicken or have a cone of homemade ice cream from Gelateria Laritza D', while watching the sun set on the Pacific. There's also a cinema, bowling alley and pool hall here, and plenty of shops. Larcomar is a great place to while away your last few hours in Lima before catching a cab to the airport.

Visit historical ruins

You don't have to trek into the Andes to see vestiges of Peru's ancient civilizations. Lima has a large number of historical ruins, known locally as huacas, which can be spotted in many neighborhoods.

The Pucllana Temple, or Huaca Pucllana, is an adobe ceremonial center that was built around 500 A.D. Much of the site has been restored and excavations continue to uncover artifacts and the occasional mummy.

The ruins are accessible Wednesday to Monday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; the last tour starts 30 minutes before closing. Admission is $2.50 for adults, and half off for children and students.

Travel Essentials

JW Marriott Hotel Lima
Malecon De La Reserva 615
Miraflores
Lima 18 
Peru
www.marriott.co.uk/hotels/maps/travel/limdt-jw-marriott-hotel-lima

Fiesta 
Av. Reducto 1278
Miraflores
Lima 18
T: +51.1.242.9009
www.restaurantfiestagourmet.com
   
Saqra
Av. La Paz 646
Miraflores 
Lima. LIMA 18
T: +51.1.650.8884 
www.saqra.pe

Larcomar
Block 6 of Malecón de la Reserva

Parque del Amor
El Malecón, Miraflores, Lima, Peru

Bike Tours of Lima
Bolivar 150, Miraflores, Lima, Peru; 51-(0)1-445-3172 or 51-(0)1-99916-64223 (mobile) biketoursoflima.com

Pucllana Temple
Block 8 of General Borgoño, Miraflores, Lima, Peru; 
51-(0)1-445-8695 or 51-(0)1-440-8276