Twenty Years of La Mar

How a cebichería changed a nation.

La Mar Cebichería, 20 years after opening. Photo: Nicholas Gill.

When I first moved to Lima in 2005, Peru’s gastronomic revolution, the “boom” as many like to refer to it now, had already been going on for a little while. Writers and chefs like Bernardo Roca Rey and Cucho la Rosa were talking about the richness of the ingredients found across Peru’s varied landscapes. The Paris trained chef Gastón Acurio had already transitioned the ingredients at his contemporary restaurant Astrid y Gastón from European ones to Peruvian ones. However, the thing that put it all into high gear, that transformed this newfound love of national cuisine from an intellectual activity into an engine for economic and social change, was what would happen on Avenida Mariscal La Mar that year.

When Acurio opened La Mar Cebichería in a triangular lot at the corner of 8 de Octubre, the street was filled auto repair shops and the occasional bodega. The restaurant did not invent the cebichería when it arrived. It wasn’t even the first cebichería to open on the street. La Red had already been set up a few blocks away for more than 20 years. La Mar was modeled after classic cebicherías like Sonia in Chorrillos, but with a livelier décor that wasn’t limited to the standard artisan fishing paraphernalia of nets and oars that was standard at most seafood restaurants in Peru at the time. There were original cocktails and modern music. It was a place that wasn’t just a destination for you and your family on the weekend, but a place to go during the week and spend hours eating and drinking.

What La Mar did do was redefine what a Peruvian restaurant could be. It was never meant to take away from the classic cebicherías in the country (if anything it has helped spur greater interest in them), but to show the vastness of what the genre could be. The vastness of what all kinds of Peruvian restaurants could be and the power they could have. It was never about lists, awards or rankings, but that a restaurant could have value beyond its transactional nature.