50 Best Just Landed in South America — Has Peru's Food Actually Become Real Soft Power?
The 50 Best Restaurants is heading to Lima, Peru for the first time in its 24-year history, marking the first time the event has been held in Peru and South America. For three decades, Peru has run one of the most deliberately engineered culinary branding campaigns in the world — anchored by chef Gastón Acurio's global vision and institutionalized through PromPerú and the Marca Perú national branding platform. The back-to-back world number one finishes by Central in 2023 and Maido in 2025 are the clearest evidence that the strategy worked at the highest level. Gastronomic tourism now accounts for 21.9% of Peru's tourism GDP, supports more than 388,000 jobs, and draws visitors who spend $196 more per trip and stay an average of 10 nights — a profile any tourism economy would want to cultivate. Yet the same boom has accelerated gentrification in Lima's Miraflores district, the 50 Best voting system carries structural biases that its own editorial staff openly acknowledges, and the economic rewards of this culinary revolution flow far more narrowly than the headline statistics suggest. This piece weighs Peru's food soft power project against its documented shadows, and asks what the global K-food push can realistically take from both the wins and the blind spots — because food can only become genuine national power when it improves the lives of the people who are actually doing the cooking.