July 26 update: I’ve found an all-vegan restaurant with food that’s as delcious and even more affordable than the food at Vida Sana. It is also much closer to where I’m staying. It’s called Loving Hut, and here are some pictures of the food, which includes vegan versions of typical Peruvian dishes such as ceviche, tacu tacu, and bistec a lo pobre.
[“seafood” dish photo]
All the meat, fish, and eggs in these photos are plant-based. The chef showed me a list of the ingredients in the vegan egg. It included potato and soy for texture and sunflower oil for the color of the yolk.
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Before my wife and I left to Perú, several of our friends remarked that we would have a very difficult or even impossible time keeping a vegetarian diet in Perú, given the heavy amounts of seafood people eat here with Lima being right on the Pacific Ocean. However, we have found that the vegetarian cuisine here is rich, delicious, affordable, and abundant.
For example, I ate out once with a friend who ordered fish and it cost twice as much as the vegan meal I ordered. I can’t remember what I ordered exactly, but it may have been lomo vegano (based on the lomo saltado), a common vegan meal pictured here. Most restaurants will make it for you even if it’s not on the menu.
Our meat-eating friends once brought us to a McDonald’s here, and we noticed that a hamburger costs 15 soles, or about 5 U.S. dollars. For the same price, you can get a multi-course, delicious vegetarian meal at the downtown restaurant Vida Sana including an appetizer, entree, tea, dessert, and a generous tip. You can see in these photos that the meals there combine fresh vegetables with a bit of delicious soy protein.
Another safe bet is to go to the ubiquitous chifa restaurants that mix together Chinese and Peruvian cuisines. These usually have several vegetarian and vegan options. I recently ordered these mixed veggies and tofu over noodles, and I’ve found that you can order similar dishes at pretty much any chifa restaurant. Vegetarian chaufa, a fried rice mixing Chinese and Peruvian style ingredients and flavors, is also easy to find at chifa restaurants (the photo of the chaufa is from the Internet and the only one that we didn’t take ourselves).
Today for lunch, my wife and I decided to check out a more upscale all-vegan restaurant called Veda. We were so hungry–and indecisive!–that we shared 3 entrees between us, but the bill still ended up being only about $15 for each of us.
The first entree was a margarita pizza made with cashew cheese. Second was called ananda and included a lentil stew, spinach, and artisenal bread. Third was a lentil burger with a sweet potato bun and fries. And for dessert, we had a vegan cheesecake. It was absolutely delicious, perhaps the best meal we’ve had here so far.
Of course, the cheapest option is to cook at home, and we do that a lot even though our apartment lacks an oven and has a barely-functioning stove. I cooked this tofu and veggie stir-fry last night, and the ingredients didn’t cost very much. The only hard part was finding the tofu. The supermarket keeps tofu in the cheese section for some reason! Burritos are another easy easy meal to make.
My point is that being a vegetarian in Lima has been pretty easy, and I’d bet that being more strictly vegan (as we are at home in the U.S.) would also be possible albeit more difficult.
You might protest that I’m missing out on a lot. Well, I’ve tried bites of the ceviche and lomo saltado and other meat and fish dishes from friends’ plates. I even had a bite of someone’s piranha (don’t believe me? here’s the picture!) The truth is that I think these vegetarian dishes are always comparable and often better than what they’re eating. And it’s almost always cheaper.
^^(Yuck. Yes I did have a bite, but, no, you’re not missing much.)