Virgilio Martínez says recognition was never the goal
In a new interview, the chef behind Lima's Central reflects on what winning the world's top restaurant ranking in 2023 changed, and what it never did.
Chef Virgilio Martínez, whose Lima restaurant Central became the first Latin American restaurant to top the World's 50 Best in 2023, says the recognition that followed was not what he had actually been chasing.
In an interview published today by the Catalan newspaper ARA, Martínez describes the gap between acclaim and the work behind it. "When you achieve worldwide recognition and admiration, you realise it wasn't what you were seeking," he says. The remark lands weeks before Lima hosts the World's 50 Best Restaurants ceremony for the first time.
He traces the distance back to his own start: a national junior figure skater in Lima who studied a year of law before training under Santi Santamaria at Can Fabes in Catalonia. Travel came first, he says; cooking only later became the reason for every trip.
World ranking doesn't sustain you. Recognition puts you on the stage, but that's the surface.
Virgilio Martínez on chasing rankings
Martínez, born in Lima in 1977, argues a ranking has a shorter life than a kitchen does. "World ranking doesn't sustain you. Recognition puts you on the stage, but that's the surface," he says. Central took the top spot in 2023 and has since moved into the list's Best of the Best category, retired from further voting.
His reference points now sit largely outside restaurant walls. He has spent recent years working with anthropologists, sociologists and roughly 300 families across the Andes, gathering ingredients and knowledge for Mater, the research initiative behind Central's menus.
Central's sister projects carry the same logic further out. Mil, in Cusco, cooks with produce tied to specific altitudes above 3,800 metres, while Kjölle, run by his wife and co-chef Pía León in Lima's Barranco district, draws on that same Mater archive.
Lima prepares for its global moment
The interview follows the Andorra Taste trajectory award, handed to Martínez this month for his work on Peruvian biodiversity. Past recipients of the honour include Michel Bras, Gastón Acurio, Ferran Adrià and Carme Ruscalleda.
On 4 November, Lima becomes the first Latin American city to host the World's 50 Best Restaurants ceremony, with more than 1,200 guests from over 34 countries expected. Central, retired as a past winner, will not compete for the title again.
Martínez ties that shift to language as much as cooking. He notes that the words for "anxiety" and "stress" do not exist in the Andean communities he now works with, and argues that being the best place in the world to work, not the best-ranked, is the real avant-garde. Whatever the ceremony decides in November, he suggests his own answer arrived earlier this year, in the fields rather than on a stage.
