For some years now Peru has raised as a global gastronomic destination, with restaurants such as Central and Maido, which have been chosen as number one in the 50 Best Restaurants awards in 2023 and 2025 respectively, consolidating a culinary tradition that Pope Leo XIV could also enjoy when he was Bishop of Chiclayo in the north of the country.
Mons. Robert Prevost, today Pope Leo XIV, was Apostolic Administrator and Bishop of Chiclayo between 2014 and 2023. In that city of the North Peruvian he used to eat at the Las Américas restaurant, located next to the Cathedral of Santa María.
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Rodrigo Couto, administrator of the place founded by his grandparents and grandson of a worshipe of the Blessed Sacrament, tells Ewtn News that on many occasions he attended to the then Mons. Prevost: “We have photos of the bishop with my grandmother” and by “that familiarity” the Pope “entered the restaurant here.”
Three were the dishes that the now Pope Leo XIV ate: the chicken chicharrón, the combined kid and the pork fried, these last two traditional dishes in the region.
“The chicken chicharrón is a dish created by my grandfather, Don Augusto Vázquez Torres, founder of this restaurant. (…) It is a chicharrón (crowded chicken in pieces), potatoes and salad but the characteristic is green, it is the cream of Huacatay (a Peruvian Andean grass), which is a secret, spicy cream that gives it that enhancement, that touch of flavor, that touch of flavor.
The administrator also indicates that the combined kid is named for the combination of rice and frejol that accompany the “kid’s dams”, which is “macerated with chicha de jora (local corn), which is the characteristic here of Chiclayo, and especially the (squash) loche that gives it a characteristic taste. On the other hand you will not find another kid like the lambay Lambayeque, region where Chiclayo is.
On pork fried, Rodrigo Couto comments that you can also “find in Piura, Trujillo, on several sides, but the preparation and presentation is different. We here in Lambayeque eat it with cassava, sweet potato and salsa.”
Food with faith, with blessing
Rodrigo remembers that sometimes Bishop Prevost “told me: son, (progress) always looking forward along the path of good. Many times he has given us the blessing, to me the clients who approached.”
Mrs. Lucrecia, a regular diner of the Las Américas restaurant and a member of the Neocatecumental road, says that “we have always kept him in mind. When we had our vigils he was going to witness them, always with much love, with much love. He treated us with great kindness. He has loved us a lot.”
“And it is a big blessing,” he concludes, “that the Lord has made us. We are very happy, very happy to have it as a potato.”
Walter Sánchez Silva
I am husband since 2008. With my wife we have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before birth. Since I joined ACI Press in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Colonia, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the family’s synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Sinodality, in 2023. I follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers the persecution of the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as the ecclesial news in the region.