352 Gastrobar revamps its menu with Peruvian fusion cuisine in Miraflores

Jair Montesinos, a chef with over 20 years of experience in Lima's hotel and restaurant kitchens, is the executive chef of INNSiDE by Meliá Lima Miraflores and has redesigned the menu. Inspired by his two years of travel to Spain, Italy, and Argentina, he recreated those cuisines using Peruvian ingredients. The menu also features a distinct Asian influence.

To start, the chef recommends the Nikkei tiradito, featuring slices of the catch of the day, a bright yellow chili sauce, and a touch of lime. Japanese seasonings like furikake, hondashi, and togarashi are added on top, enhancing the flavor of this Peruvian-Japanese dish.

A must-try dish, and one of the most popular on the menu, is the chanchito chifero: pork belly cooked slowly until tender. It's served with an oriental sauce made with soy sauce, star anise, oyster sauce, and white wine, and accompanied by a pickled turnip and a portion of white chaufa rice.

With Italian influences, the restaurant offers tortellini and loche, a pasta filled with seafood sauce that has a concentrated parihuela (seafood stew) flavor. It's served on a bed of loche squash sauce, drizzled with cilantro oil, and topped with crispy bacon bits.

Another star dish is duck with rice, prepared using a technique similar to paella, which preserves the flavors of cilantro and loche squash, typical of northern Peru. It's presented in an iron skillet to create a crust, and the duck is served in two cuts cooked at different times: one magret and the other confit.

For dessert, the tres leches cake with lucuma has a deconstructed presentation, decorated with flowers, fruit, and a milk sauce. With this approach, the restaurant seeks to establish itself as a place with its own identity and bring haute cuisine closer to the community: on weekends it offers open Nikkei bars with makis and nigiris, and during the week it offers themed menus for professionals, local residents, and people who work in nearby offices.