The prestigious list The World’s 50 Best Restaurants has announced the election of Peruvian Pía León as the World’s Best Female Chef 2021, Virgilio Martínez’s right-hand man at Central restaurant in Lima, and for the past three years at the helm of her own project, Kjolle.
Central, in Lima, has earned a reputation as one of the best restaurants, not only in South America, but in the world, and has been on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for years, an achievement attributed mainly to its founder and chef-owner, Virgilio Martínez. But behind the scenes, running the restaurant alongside Martínez for more than a decade, has been her right-hand, partner, Pía León, until August 2018 when she opened her first solo restaurant – Kjolle – which she co-owns with Virgilio Martínez and also co-manages another of the couple’s restaurants, Mil, in the Peruvian Andes.
Pía León, best female chef in the world
Pía León, 34, is a highly respected figure in the restaurant world for the role she has played at Central, which she led to number one in the top fifty restaurants in Latin America for three consecutive years with her partner, Virgilio Martínez. She started in the kitchen more than ten years ago, after a stint at the Ritz Hotel in New York and a stint at Astrid y Gastón in Lima, and worked her way up to become head chef, managing the day-to-day running of the kitchen and accompanying Martínez and her sister Malena on their research trips to discover new ingredients for their tasting menu, based on Peru’s biodiversity.
In 2015 he began his project to open his own restaurant, a space that would be his from conception to completion. That restaurant is Kjolle, opened in August 2018 in the same complex as the relocated Central. That same year, Leon was voted Best Female Chef in Latin America, and fifteen months after opening, Kjolle earned the Best New Entry Award when it debuted on the 2019 Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants list at number 21.
While Central’s twenty-odd dishes are grouped by the different elevations of Peruvian geography-the sea, the mountains, the Amazon-Kjolle’s menu is less structured, with a nine-course tasting and a la carte menu featuring ingredients from all over Peru, proposals that necessarily bear some of the hallmark that Pía León has developed over many years at Central-bright, colorful ingredients, intricately plated in a mix of specially designed plates and bowls-often presented within fragments of nature.
