Tour Overview
Lima has been named the World's Leading Culinary Destination six years in a row. Peru's cuisine is not a trend - it is a 5,000-year-old story of ingredients, territories, and cultures that no other country can replicate. This private 7-day gastronomic journey takes you through that story, from the Pacific coast to the Andean highlands.
You begin in Lima, dining at restaurants that appear consistently on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, exploring the culinary neighborhoods of Miraflores and Barranco, and visiting the city's extraordinary food markets with a private chef. From Lima, you fly to Cusco and the Sacred Valley, where Andean gastronomy reveals a completely different dimension: ancient grains, heritage potatoes, and the farm-to-table concept that has existed in Peru for millennia before it became fashionable elsewhere.
Quick Facts
Duration
7 Days / 6 Nights
Destinations
Lima · Sacred Valley · Machu Picchu · Cusco
Travel Style
Gastronomy
Tour Type
100% Private & Taylor-Made
This is not a food tour. It is a journey through Peru's identity - told through its flavors, its chefs, its markets, and its land.
In Lima, explore beautifully preserved colonial architecture, vibrant districts, and the culinary traditions that have positioned Peru among the world’s leading gastronomic destinations. Each visit is thoughtfully paced and privately guided.
In Lima, widely recognized as the gastronomic capital of South America, explore vibrant local markets, contemporary fine-dining restaurants, and historic districts that showcase Peru’s diverse culinary heritage. Each experience is privately guided and thoughtfully curated, offering exclusive access to award-winning chefs, seasonal tastings, and refined dining experiences that define luxury travel in Peru.
Travel beyond the table into the origins of Peru’s world-renowned cuisine. Visit traditional Andean communities, discover native ingredients such as quinoa, ají peppers, and Andean potatoes, and learn how ancient agricultural traditions continue to influence modern Peruvian gastronomy. This private culinary itinerary connects culture, history, and flavor in an authentic yet elevated way.
Every element of this private luxury Peru tour is fully customizable — from boutique hotel selection to curated tastings and exclusive dining reservations. With expert local guides, seamless logistics, and personalized pacing, this gastronomic tour experience is crafted to reflect your culinary interests while maintaining the highest standards of comfort and sophistication. This itinerary forms part of our Gastronomic Luxury Travel in Peru collection, curated for travelers seeking refined culinary immersion across the country.
This journey combines Peru’s most iconic cultural destinations with the country’s vibrant culinary traditions. From the historic districts and celebrated restaurants of Lima to the ancient Inca capital of Cusco, each destination reveals a different dimension of Peru’s culture, flavors, and heritage.
Lima – The Culinary Capital of South America
In Lima, travelers explore one of the world’s most exciting food destinations. The experience introduces the ingredients and traditions behind iconic dishes such as ceviche and the famous pisco sour while discovering the diversity that defines modern Peruvian cuisine.
Sacred Valley - Agriculture & Andean Traditions
The fertile landscapes of the Sacred Valley have supported Andean communities for centuries. Visitors explore remarkable places such as Pisac while discovering traditional farming practices and native crops that continue to shape regional cuisine and everyday life in surrounding villages and rural communities.
Machu Picchu – Inca Heritage in the Andes
The legendary citadel of Machu Picchu stands as one of the greatest achievements of the Inca civilization. Its terraces, temples, and surrounding mountains reveal remarkable engineering and agricultural knowledge that allowed the Incas to cultivate crops in challenging environments and sustain communities across the Andes.
Cusco – History, Culture and Andean Flavors
The historic city of Cusco blends Inca heritage with Spanish colonial architecture and vibrant traditions. Today the city offers an evolving culinary scene where traditional Andean ingredients meet contemporary creativity. Restaurants, markets, and historic streets reveal how culture, history, and gastronomy come together in this remarkable Andean destination.
This journey blends Peru’s renowned culinary traditions with its most iconic cultural destinations. From tasting authentic flavors in Lima to exploring ancient Inca landscapes and the legendary citadel of Machu Picchu, travelers experience the rich connection between gastronomy, history, culture, landscapes, traditions, and unforgettable travel experiences across Peru.
Peruvian Culinary Discovery
Inca Agricultural Heritage
Guided Food Experience in Lima
Private Machu Picchu Exploration
Sacred Valley Cultural Landscapes
Personalized Private Journey
Day-by-day Itinerary
Each day is privately guided and fully flexible. Timings, pace, and activities can be adjusted to your preferences.
Lima has quietly, then loudly, become one of the world's great food cities - and the moment you land, you begin to understand why. After your airport welcome and transfer to Miraflores, the city's culinary pulse is immediately tangible: cevicherías tucked between surf shops, hole-in-the-wall picanterías, and rooftop restaurants where chefs plate Amazonian ingredients with jeweler's precision.
Your introductory city tour leads you through the Historic Centre, framing Lima's story not just through architecture but through flavor. The colonial era imported Spanish olives, grapes, and cattle; the 19th century brought Chinese and Japanese immigrants who reinvented local ingredients with wok heat and umami depth. The result is a cuisine of beautiful, productive collisions - and tonight, your first dinner sets the tone for everything to come.
Whether you choose a traditional cevichería in Barranco, a Nikkei tasting menu in Miraflores, or a beloved chifa in the old quarter, Lima delivers its promise immediately. Every dish is an argument for coming back. The city's culinary scene does not perform for tourists - it simply does what it has always done, with confidence born of centuries of practice and innovation.
Overnight in Lima.
This is the day Lima reveals its secrets. Your morning begins at one of the city's great traditional markets - a cathedral of color, scent, and sound where fishmongers lay out the morning's catch from the Humboldt Current, herbalists stack dried roots and jungle botanicals, and fruit vendors arrange towers of lucuma, chirimoya, and guanábana that you will not find in any supermarket on earth.
Your expert guide will walk you through each section, explaining ingredients, introducing you to vendors who have worked the same stalls for generations, and decoding the culinary vocabulary of Peru one ingredient at a time. You'll learn why ají amarillo is the soul of Peruvian cooking, how different varieties of potato express different altitudes, and what separates a great leche de tigre from a mediocre one.
The afternoon is hands-on: a private cooking class with a professional chef translates your market experience into action. You'll prepare two or three iconic Peruvian dishes - perhaps ceviche, ají de gallina, and a pisco sour - learning techniques that you can replicate at home. By the time you sit down to eat what you've made, you are no longer a visitor to Peruvian cuisine. You are a practitioner.
Overnight in Lima.
Your morning flight carries you from the Pacific into the Andean highlands, where the air is thinner and the ingredients are different. At Awanacancha, you encounter the animals that supply the Andes with its most prized protein: alpaca. Beyond their textile significance, alpacas are a cornerstone of high-altitude gastronomy - their lean, mineral-rich meat appears on the menus of Cusco's finest restaurants prepared in preparations that range from the ancient to the contemporary.
Pisac market offers your first taste of Sacred Valley produce: giant-kernel Andean corn in shades of purple, white, and cream; native potato varieties in over three thousand cultivars; dried herbs and spices that have perfumed Andean cooking for millennia. Browse with appetite and curiosity - the market is both pantry and museum, and every vendor is an encyclopedia of traditional foodways.
Lunch today is served in the Sacred Valley itself - a curated meal at a restaurant sourcing directly from surrounding farms, where altitude and volcanic soil produce ingredients of extraordinary intensity. From heritage potatoes roasted in a pachamanca earth oven to fresh trout from glacial streams, the meal frames the valley not just as landscape but as larder: one of the most productive and delicious landscapes on earth.
Overnight in the Sacred Valley.
Maras salt has flavored Andean cooking for over five hundred years. Your morning begins at the famous salt evaporation ponds, where you'll meet the families who still harvest this mineral-rich, rosy-hued salt by hand - the same way their ancestors did under Inca rule. Your guide will explain the difference between Maras salt and industrial sea salt and why chefs from Lima to Copenhagen now specifically seek it out for their kitchens.
Moray's circular terraces are believed to have been the Inca's agricultural research station - a system of microclimates that allowed them to develop and refine crop varieties across different altitude bands. Standing in its concentric rings, you begin to understand that Peruvian cuisine did not happen by accident. It was engineered, tested, and perfected over generations by a civilization that understood soil and climate with a sophistication that still impresses modern agronomists.
Lunch today is a highlight of the entire journey: a curated picnic staged at Maras with panoramic views of the Sacred Valley. Locally sourced ingredients - Andean cheeses, charcuterie, heritage grain bread, fresh tomatoes, native potato salad, and seasonal fruits - are laid out on a table set in the open air, with the Andes as your dining room walls. It is one of those meals you will describe for years.
Overnight in the Sacred Valley.
The train to Aguas Calientes departs in the early morning light, winding through cloud forest so dense and green it feels like traveling through a living thing. The journey itself is part of the experience - a slow, beautiful unspooling of altitude and vegetation that prepares you, in mood if not in body, for the wonder ahead. Pack your appetite: breakfast in the train dining car, with mountains scrolling past the windows, is unexpectedly lovely.
Machu Picchu rewards you with its full spectacle: the terraced city hanging between peaks, the temples aligned to solstices, the agricultural sectors feeding an empire at altitude. Your certified guide will walk you through the site's remarkable history - its construction, its sudden abandonment, and its rediscovery in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, guided, as is now widely acknowledged, by local Quechua farmers who had never forgotten it was there.
After your visit, Aguas Calientes offers a charming respite: the village is built over rushing rivers and surrounded by cloud forest, with restaurants serving fresh trout, alpaca stew, and quinoa-based soups that restore body and spirit after a morning of archaeological wonder. Lunch here is simple, honest, and delicious - exactly what mountain food should be - before you board the return train to Cusco.
Overnight in Cusco.
Your morning city tour of Cusco is an immersion in the archaeology of flavor as much as architecture. At Sacsayhuamán, your guide explains how the Inca feasted during the festival of Inti Raymi - thousands of participants sharing chicha de jora, roasted guinea pig, and pachamanca prepared in communal earth ovens. Food was not incidental to Inca ceremony; it was ceremonial itself, a form of reverence expressed through nourishment.
Qorikancha, the Temple of the Sun, and the city's colonial streets carry you through centuries of culinary history: the arrival of wheat, sugar, and olive oil from Spain; the fusion of indigenous and European ingredients that gave rise to the rich, complex dishes of Peruvian highland cooking - the estofados, the adobos, the chairo soups that still warm Cusco tables on cold Andean evenings.
Lunch today is a celebration: a table reserved at one of Cusco's landmark restaurants in the historic centre, where contemporary highland cuisine honors its roots without being constrained by them. Expect quinoa risotto alongside braised alpaca, native potato terrine next to Amazonian fruit coulis - food that tells a complete story of Peru's cultural geography in a single sitting. It is a fitting crescendo to a week of extraordinary eating.
Overnight in Cusco.
Your final morning in Cusco is yours to savour slowly. Perhaps one last cup of café de altura - grown at elevation on the slopes below you - before your transfer to the airport. Perhaps one final empanada from the bakery on the corner that you discovered three days ago and have been returning to ever since. The small food rituals of travel are often its most enduring pleasures.
Your flight returns you to Lima, where a connection awaits for your onward journey. If time permits before your international departure, the airport's artisan shops stock an excellent selection of Peru's culinary exports: chocolate made from native cacao varietals, bottles of premium pisco from Ica's valleys, dried ají blends, and quinoa varieties that will let you attempt - however imperfectly - to recreate what you tasted this week.
You leave Peru with more than a suitcase. You leave with a revised understanding of what food can be when it grows from the right soil, prepared by hands that have known it for generations, shared in landscapes of staggering beauty. Peruvian cuisine is not a trend. It is a civilization, distilled into a bowl. And you have sat at its table.
End of tour. Buen provecho and safe travels.
May – September
Dry Season
Clear skies and comfortable temperatures make market visits, outdoor meals, and Sacred Valley exploration especially pleasant.
Year Around ★
Works any time of year
Lima's food scene is exceptional 365 days a year. The Sacred Valley has a mild, temperate climate. No bad season for a gastronomic journey.
December – March
Green Season
Lima is at its best and the Andes are greener. Some rain in the Sacred Valley - but nothing that affects the culinary experience.
EXPLORE CONNECTED STYLES:
✔️ Private arrival and departure transfers throughout the entire journey
✔️ Luxury train Ollantaytambo or Poroy ↔ Aguas Calientes (round trip)
✔️ Private bus Aguas Calientes ↔ Machu Picchu citadel (round trip)
✔️ Machu Picchu entrance tickets with reserved morning time slot
✔️ 6 nights in hand-selected luxury boutique hotels (5-star or equivalent)
✔️ Daily breakfast at hotel and selected lunches
✔️ Cultural guide with specialization in Andean food history and traditions
✔️ Private transportation in comfortable, air-conditioned vehicles throughout
✔️ Private cooking class in Lima (2–3 hours)
✔️ Entrance fees to all sites in the itinerary
✔️ 24/7 Epic Andean concierge support throughout your journey
Recommended Luxury Accommodations
Charming, character-rich properties that reflect local identity and architectural heritage. Ideal for travelers seeking comfort, authenticity, and personalized service in carefully curated settings.
Examples may include selected boutique hotels in Lima’s Miraflores district and refined colonial-style properties in Cusco and the Sacred Valley.
High-end hotels offering elevated service standards, refined design, and premium amenities. These properties combine comfort, location, and exclusive atmosphere.
Options may include internationally recognized luxury brands and distinguished Andean retreats.
For travelers seeking the highest level of privacy and exclusivity, premium upgrades may include luxury suites, heritage mansions, or iconic Andean lodges with exceptional service and views.
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Our travel specialists will tailor every culinary moment to your preferences.