Mauka

It operates inside Palacio Nazarenas, the Belmond hotel at C. Nazarenas 223 in central Cusco. Pía León — named the world's best female chef in 2021 — leads it, and Leonel Almanza, a Cusco native who joined the hotel in 2015, heads the kitchen. The name is not decoration: mauka is an Incan tuber at risk of disappearing, and that is the menu's statement of purpose, crossing the high plateau and the jungle — Andean grains with squash cream, slow-cooked beef cheek with giant Urubamba corn, smoked amaranth and caiguas; among the dishes Google flags as popular are the smoked duck and the crema di pomodoro. Our read: this is the project of a chef who already proved herself in Lima, applied to a recipe book that is not hers, and naming the restaurant after a near-extinct tuber says more about the intent than any menu could; the spend diners report — more than S/ 200 per person — puts it among the highest tickets in the directory. The practicalities: it opens all seven days on a split service, 12 to 3:30 and 6:30 to 10 at night, and accepts reservations. The entry records a 2025 Summum nomination for Restaurant of Cusco and a 2026 Premios Somos nomination in the Cusco Region category. Curation note: the directory entry carried no address. Operating inside the hotel, Google publishes no accessibility, wifi or parking attributes of the restaurant's own; whatever appears belongs to Palacio Nazarenas.