Published by Team Tunupa / September 24, 2026
Quinoa cooked like risotto, grilled alpaca, trout with high-altitude herbs, crispy guinea pig served as a signature dish. Novoandina cuisine takes the ingredients the Andes have grown for millennia and presents them with contemporary techniques and ideas.
Here is where this movement comes from and why Cusco is the ideal place to try it.
How novoandina cuisine began
The term novoandina cuisine began to be used in Peru in the 1980s. A group of cooks and researchers set out to give new value to Andean products, which had long been seen as humble food, and bring them to restaurant tables with new techniques.
Over the years, the boom of Peruvian gastronomy strengthened that idea: Andean ingredients became a source of pride and creativity.
The ingredients that define it
- Grains: quinoa, kiwicha, cañihua and tarwi.
- Tubers: native potatoes, olluco, oca and mashua.
- Andean meats: alpaca, lamb, guinea pig and trout from high-altitude lakes and rivers.
- Herbs and chilies: huacatay, muña, rocoto and ají amarillo.
- Corn: choclo, purple corn and cancha in all its forms.
Tradition and technique
Novoandina cooking does not replace traditional cuisine: it converses with it. A pachamanca or a chiriuchu remain sacred in their original form. Novoandina cuisine, instead, offers new ways to present those same flavors: new textures, precise cooking and plating that highlights each product.
The result is dishes that surprise without losing their roots.
Why try it in Cusco
In Cusco, Andean ingredients are close at hand: they arrive fresh from the Sacred Valley and high-altitude communities. Eating novoandina food here means tasting it at its source, near the fields where it is grown and the traditions that inspire it.
Novoandina at Tunupa
On Tunupa’s menu you will find dishes that combine tradition and technique, such as grilled alpaca with four-cheese risotto, lamb shank, crispy guinea pig, Tunupa trout and Andean ceviche. Each starts from an Andean product and presents it with a modern eye.
All overlooking the Plaza de Armas or surrounded by the gardens of the Sacred Valley.
Conclusion: the Andes on your plate
Novoandina cuisine is a way of saying that Andean products deserve a place of honor at the table. Trying it in Cusco shows that tradition can also evolve.
Andean roots, contemporary vision.
