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[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”179″ gal_title=”Malabar”]
Neutral colors fill the dining room- creams, browns, white linens and chevron-patterned wood floors. An eclectic mix of paintings hang. The wine room remains exposed. The sumptuous bar that greets you as you enter the premises. A desirable address is hidden from the outside chaos of the surrounding city.
And after 13 years, Pedro Miguel Schiaffino’s Malabar is still highly regarded in Lima, making the latest list of Latin America’s top 50 restaurants, in the same company as Maido, Astrid y Gaston, and Central.
The most photogenic dish award has to go to the Arroz Cremoso con Betarragas, a beet risotto richly pink in hue and featuring a contrasting pool of white cream to create the bullseye, and a couple of artfully arranged edible flowers. The white cream sauce featured an Andean cheese, which unfortunately confirms that Peruvian dairy has a long way to go, as it was essentially flavorless. A stronger goat or blue cheese may have been the more obvious choice, but there’s a reason why the pair works well. The earthy sweetness of beets demands a richer, more pungent cheese to stand up to it. Despite that, I appreciated the dish as a whole – it was rich and creamy, and the kitchen did a good job at tapering the ‘dirt’ flavors typical of many beet-based dishes.
Emu Encebollado was a riff on steak with onions. Ok, that’s a stretch, and I still appreciated the technique used for the escabeche of onions as well as the tenderness of the emu steak, still perfectly pink in the center. However the combination wasn’t very memorable, and I couldn’t help asking myself, was this just an effort to feature an exotic meat because I had no compelling reason to love the dish.
Merengon de Fruta de Estación will likely please that crowd who actually take pleasure in eating sweetened egg whites (sorry meringue fans). It was light and fresh, and a better, more creamy take on a meringue than the over-sweetened versions you might find in less capable hands. But it ultimately fell flat due to the accompanying bed of seasonal fruit. This seemed a misnomer, as the fruit was neither ripe nor as perfumed as one would expect from produce in season.