Food Friday: Lima through Foursquare, Part 4

From now on, Food Porn Fridays will mostly be a selection of the best places we’ve eaten, snacked or drunk at during the past week.

Of course, you’ll be able to get early access to all the places we check in to every day by following us on Foursquare, which you can do through the website, the iPhone app or the Android app. You’ll also be able to use the app to find cool places around your area too once you join!

With our departure from Lima coming up faster than we'd realised, we tried squeezing in a lot of new places we'd had on our to do list this past week, so this week's food porn offerings are a little more diverse than of late.

Tortas Lucas

One evening this past week, Zab and I were settling down about to watch one of our TV series, and I suddenly decided that we needed to have something sweet. It was about 10pm, so even though it may not have been too realistic to expect many places near our apartment to be open, I went out on the hunt for cake anyway.

Luckily, I stumbled upon this take-away desert place, which seem pretty common in Peru, and apparently stay open late just for this reason. The cupcakes were particularly delicious, and at only S/5 (£1.15) each, also kinda a bargain. Shown here are the strawberry, manjar (dulce de leche) and coffee varieties, all of which contained a gooey center of those flavours. It may have become our go-to place for late night sweet tooth fixes, which is a pretty regular occurrence.

Details: Foursquare; website; Juan de la Fuente 332 (Miraflores) and Avenida San Luis 2675 (San Borja).

El Pan de la Chola

Apparently a good place to go for a light afternoon snack and a craft beer, we instead went for brunch. They don't serve brunch per se, but we cobbled together something from the menu. As the name suggests, bread is their thing, and it was good!

We ordered fresh, toasted seed bread with hummus and olive oil and the bread was wonderfully fresh and crunchy, but also surprisingly dense making it a generous snack. Aside from that we had a pot of white tea (in perhaps the coolest tea pot we've seen in a while), freshly squeeze orange juice, a chocolate chip cookie and a pot of organic passion fruit yoghurt (not pictured, because I'd already eaten it!).

The food and drinks were good, but the service was pretty slow, the wifi didn't work and the music was too loud, so I'm not sure I'd return. It's also a bakery, so you can just pop in to buy their bread, which would definitely be worth it if you're in the neighbourhood.

Details: Foursquare; Facebook; Avenida La Mar 918 (Miraflores).

La Lucha Sanguchería Criolla

I love the Peruvian spanification of the English word sandwich: sanguch. As far as I've seen, it's something particular to Peruvian Spanish, as everywhere else they seem to use the English spelling, though of course the pronunciation differs. And this place caught my eye for that reason.

It's a half indoor, half outdoor affair, where you order, pay, give your name and wait for your food to be called out for you, which can be a challenge to catch as it's full and noisy most of the time, and in that way, it reminded me a lot of a sandwich place I used to go to in Mérida, Spain.

Their thing is big roast pork sandwiches on fresh, crusty bread. We opted for simple roast chicken sandwiches and a surprisingly fresh and natural pineapple, orange and strawberry juice. The bread was indeed fresh and crusty and the chicken succulent and well seasoned. Overall, a good place for substantial but quick snack.

Details: Foursquare; website; Pasaje Marcelino Champagnat 139 (Miraflores) and Ovalo Gutierrez (San Isidro).

La Baguette

We actually went to this café twice this past week, and only returned the second time because it was convenient to where we'd been coming from. On the first visit, we were there mostly just to use the wifi and fuel ourselves with a slab of cake, which was fine, but nothing amazing. The second time, we arrived early enough for a late breakfast, and the quality and quantity of what we were presented with surprised us.

Zab had the ‘American' breakfast which consisted of scrambled eggs with ham, a basket of different (freshly baked) breads and croissants, coffee and ae juice, and I opted for the ‘light' breakfast which in fact meant an enormous and fresh fruit salad (banana, strawberry, melon, papaya, pineapple and grape) with yoghurt and honey, as well as some toast, tea and a fresh juice.