What to eat and drink in Peru: dishes, etiquette and dietary tips

Peru's cooking runs on three larders: the Pacific, the Andes and the Amazon, plus the Chinese (chifa) and Japanese (Nikkei) kitchens that grew out of Lima's immigrant communities. Coastal cooking leans on fish and lime, the highlands on potatoes, corn and chilli, the lowlands on river fish, plantain and jungle fruit.

The dishes below are the ones worth planning a day around. Ceviche is the coast's signature and a lunch dish: raw white fish cured in lime with chilli and onion, served with sweet potato and corn. In Lima, order it at a cevichería at midday. Lomo saltado, beef stir-fried with onion, tomato and soy sauce and served with chips and rice, is the chifa crossover you will find everywhere, from market stalls to smart restaurants.

In the Andes, look for cuy (guinea pig), roasted or pressed and fried, which is festive food rather than an everyday dish, and chairo, a hearty highland soup. Arequipa has its own picantería tradition: rocoto relleno (hot red pepper stuffed with beef and baked with cheese), adobo (pork marinated in chicha, a Sunday breakfast) and chupe de camarones, a rich river-shrimp chowder. In the Amazon around Iquitos and Puerto Maldonado, eat juane, rice with chicken, egg and olives steamed in a bijao leaf, and tacacho with cecina, mashed plantain with smoked pork.

Lunch is the value meal. A menú del día — soup, a main and sometimes a drink — is the cheapest full meal in the country and is eaten by office workers and students, not just travellers. Tourist-district restaurants in Miraflores, Cusco's centre and Arequipa's plaza charge several times a market-menu price for the same dish.

Dinner is usually à la carte and costs more than lunch. Pollo a la brasa is the reliable cheap dinner: a quarter or half chicken with chips feeds one or two. Street snacks — anticuchos, picarones — are the cheapest way to eat in the evening.

Street food in Peru is an evening affair. Anticuchos, skewers of marinated beef heart grilled over coals, and picarones, squash-and-sweet-potato doughnuts with fig-leaf syrup, appear after dark on carts and at fairs. The usual rule applies: choose the cart with a queue, where the food is cooked in front of you and served hot.

For drinks, the safe defaults are bottled water, boiled water and hot infusions. Chicha morada, a sweet purple-corn drink, and chicha de jora, fermented corn beer, are both common; the fermented kind is mildly alcoholic. Pisco sour is the national cocktail, and coca tea is everywhere in Cusco and the highlands. Tap water is not for drinking; hotels and cafés increasingly offer filtered refills, and boiling for a minute also makes water safe. Ice in tourist restaurants and hotels is generally fine; be more cautious with crushed ice from street carts.

Meals run on a simple clock. Breakfast is light, lunch is the main meal of the day and dinner is late by North American or British standards, often after 8pm. Say "buen provecho" when you join or leave a table where people are eating — it is the local equivalent of enjoy your meal. Ceviche is a lunch dish, and many cevicherías close by late afternoon, so do not plan it for dinner.

Vegetarian eating is straightforward in Lima, Cusco and Arequipa, where dedicated restaurants and set menus exist, but soups and stews often use meat stock even when the dish looks vegetable-based. The phrase "Soy vegetariano/a, sin carne ni caldo de carne" covers it. Halal options are limited outside Lima; seafood and vegetarian dishes are the practical fallback. For gluten-free travellers, potato, corn, quinoa and rice are everywhere, but soy sauce in saltados and chifa dishes contains wheat. Shellfish allergies need care: fish and seafood stocks go into many coastal dishes, so ask about caldo de pescado as well as the visible ingredients. Carry a card in Spanish naming your allergen and treat it as a medical warning, not a preference.

Altitude changes appetite and digestion. In Cusco, Puno and the Sacred Valley, eat lightly on the first day, drink more water than usual and go easy on alcohol and heavy fried food until you have acclimatised. Coca tea is the local remedy; it is mild and widely served.

Food safety follows the usual travel pattern: busy places, hot food, cooked to order. Ceviche is raw fish, so eat it where turnover is high and the fish looks fresh. If you have a sensitive stomach, take it easy on raw seafood and street ice in the first days. For anything beyond a mild upset, see the health page.

Lima is the country's food capital and the easiest place to try everything in one trip: cevicherías and criollo restaurants in Miraflores and Barranco, chifa in the centre, and markets such as Surquillo for cheap set lunches. Cusco covers Andean cooking and has plenty of vegetarian and traveller-oriented menus in the centre. Arequipa is the place for picanterías and rocoto relleno, and Iquitos for Amazonian dishes such as juane and tacacho con cecina.

If you are moving between regions, match the dish to the place: seafood on the coast, cuy and soups in the highlands, river fish in the Amazon. Trying a dish in its home region is usually cheaper and better than the same dish in a tourist district.