The first Peruvian chef to go into the Amazon to work his products told us about his experience after Covid (he has had to close his two gastronomic restaurants) and he presented paiche, “a tasty river fish of which every piece is used”.

Peruvian chef and activist Pedro Miguel Shiaffino, currently chef of Boa, “a small Amazonian fast food establishment”, was in San Sebastián Gastronomika this Thursday to present a fish indigenous to the Amazon, a region which Schiaffino is looking to promote gastronomically. We are referring to paiche, “the hog of the sea”, as the chef calls it, being a predator and eating other fish “it is rich in flavour”, and all its parts can be used.

Schiaffino cooked it live to show the possibilities of this fish he has helped to recover with his NGO Despensa Amazónica, working with local Amazonian products and producers to promote its consumption. No wonder, the chef, “one of the historical chefs in Peru”, using the words of journalist Ignacio Medina, was one of the first to take his cuisine to the Amazon. It’s a spectacular landscape that Peruvians know little about, with enormous possibilities”, he reiterated.

This is the reason he has spent years helping the local fishermen to establish fishing quotas and respect environmental regulations, managing to increase the population of paiches and give the fish a culinary value, thereby increasing the benefits of the communities of collectors.

“I have had to close my two gastronomic restaurants”

The Peruvian presented the paiche, but seized the opportunity to take stock of the current situation of the restaurant sector in Peru. His example speaks for itself. Schiaffino has closed his two restaurants he ran (AmaZ and Malabar, which managed to make it into the Latin American version of 50 Best Restaurants) due to “the slump in tourism, from which a large majority of restaurants in Peru lived off”.  However, adapting himself to the situation, he has opened the same number of businesses for local clients, such as a small fish store that sells the fish from his network of producers, door-to-door, a small grocer’s shop or Boa, his Amazonian fast food business.

“They’re small businesses that work well now, enabling me to also provide for the producers I work with in the Amazon”. Malabar and AmaZ, he concluded, “were impossible to sustain without tourists, so I closed them in order to not build up further debt”.