Peru: Pizzeria “Libertad”

As mentioned, I recently took a trip to Peru, visiting the Amazon area, Cusco, and Machu Picchu/Aguas Calientes… follow along as I show you everything I ate on my amazing trip!

After our second lunch of cuy on Friday, we headed to the train that would take us to the bus that would take us back to Cusco where we checked back into Inkarri.  A quick shower later, all four of us trooped out to find some dinner at this late hour – it was 9:30 or so – and settled on this place nearish to Inkarri.  It offered up a huge mishmash of cuisines:

Baked meats, pastas, Mexican, pizza, Italian… nearly whatever you wanted, you could probably find here.  HB wasn’t feeling too great, and just needed food.  BF had been saying the entire trip he wanted to try the pizza – despite StB telling us beforehand that the pizza here was gross – and HBBF was down for whatever.  So we went inside and were greeted by this sight:

a huge oven, and a man churning out the pizzas. 

I decided to order some ‘nachos’ to start, which came quickly but wasn’t quite what I expected.  Instead of fried corn tortilla wedges, these were fried wonton wrappers (yes, I recognize the taste), and the cheese was super ‘stinky’ (from the stinky family, really), and quite pungent.  I found myself scraping the cheese to a minimum and eating the chips a bit, solo.  Everyone agreed these were pretty rank.  I suggested this was the cheese that was used for the pizzas as well, and the two guys, who’d both ordered pizzas, did not look happy with this thought. 

A basket of bread with some herb butter was brought.  It was okay, but good to munch on because the food took forever. 

Not wanting pizza, I’d ordered a baked chicken with garlic dish.  The chicken was white meat, to my sadface, but was flavored well despite being dry.  Lots of garlic was scattered in there, which was a great thing.  The side of potatoes and veggies were ok, pretty standard. 

HBBF had ordered a ‘choose 4 toppings of your own’ pizza and went with bacon, chicken, avocado and one other thing I am having trouble recalling… he liked the toppings and found the cheese pretty inoffensive, but we noted that his pizza…

which had a decent upskirt, was not quite as covered liberally in cheese as BF’s. 

BF, ever the purist, had ordered a plain cheese pie. 

Again, not a bad upskirt, but the stinky cheese put me off.  BF kept an open mind and ate most of it; the slice I ate initially was tasty enough, though I found the cheese quite off-putting.  When he was done eating his fill, I picked up the last slice and found that after finishing my garlicky meal, just one bite of the pizza was enough for me to turn my face and say “No!” to any more of the slice.  Too stinky. 

Dinner was pretty cheap, and it was a fun experience to sit in an establishment that was clearly frequented by many locals over any of the other places we’d been going to earlier in the trip that were geared solely to tourists.  While I can’t say I would recommend this place, I definitely recommend wandering around into (and out of) random restaurants on the roads, even as dinky hole in the walls as they might seem (this place actually turned out to be HUGE – it had a small entrance and a small first room, but the second room extended very far back).  There’s a ton of food out there to discover – the wide majority of it will never make it into your guidebooks, but there’s a lot that would be worthy of the most rapt attention.  And hey, you might like this stinky cheese stuff… it just isn’t to my taste 🙂