Casa Zúñiga

Casa Zúñiga is not a restaurant in the ordinary sense: it is María Zúñiga's own house on Pasaje La Viñita, in Barranco, cooking behind closed doors and by reservation only. Her mother started selling tamales in 1955; she grew up kneading dough from the age of four, spent twenty years as an auditor travelling the country, and in 1992 left that career for the kitchen. Today she has around eighty kinds of tamal — the chickpea one is the family emblem, but she also makes them with quinoa, chuño and cushuro — humitas that stretch as far as a pisco sour version, an ají de gallina with yellow potato, and convent sweets from arroz con leche to chancay pudding. In 2026 the Premios Somos gave her the Bernardo Roca Rey Lifetime Achievement Award. Our read: don't go looking without writing first, and when you write, ask what she is cooking that day — she sets the menu.