Guests who are lucky enough to snag a table at Virgilio Martínez’s fine-dining restaurant – named Central, in the Peruvian capital of Lima – get to experience a tasting menu crafted with rare ingredients from remote locations across the country.
Central was named the world’s best restaurant in 2023 by the prestigious World's 50 Best list. With dishes inspired from Peru’s natural landscape, exotic ingredients on its extensive tasting menu can include octopus, Amazonian fish, coca leaves, river snails, sweet lemon, crab and squid.
However, guests who attended Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant’s lavish wedding did not have to fly to Peru to experience Virgilio Martínez’s cooking. The billionaire Ambani family flew down the world’s top chef and his team to Mumbai to wow their guests. In fact, Virgilio Martínez dreamt up an all-vegetarian menu for the Gujarati wedding.
A post going viral on X shows the tasting menu created by the chef behind the world’s best restaurant for Anant Ambani’s wedding.
The eight options include dishes like “Cashew roll, mountain chimichurri, fresh cheese”, “Extreme altitude seeds, smoked tomato” and “Amazonian cassava textures, coconut milk.”
Take a look at the menu below:
{{/usCountry}}The eight options include dishes like “Cashew roll, mountain chimichurri, fresh cheese”, “Extreme altitude seeds, smoked tomato” and “Amazonian cassava textures, coconut milk.”
Take a look at the menu below:
{{/usCountry}}The menu attracted a range of amused responses, with several people puzzled by the dishes.
“All this is good. But I am not able to understand what 50% of dishes mean,” wrote a commenter. “I just want to know what is Pistachio Tigers milk,” another said.
“Indian vegetarians like, what? No Paneer?” wrote one X user. Several others joked about the omission of Indian staples like paneer and dal from the menu.
Martínez, of course, was one of several world-class chefs who catered the high-profile wedding which has gone down as one of the most expensive weddings in history. The guest list included former UK PM Boris Johnson, reality TV stars Kim Kardashian and Khloe Kardashian, wrestler John Cena, Bollywood A-listers Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Priyanka Chopra and many more VIPs.
According to a report in news website Peru21, Martinez was accompanied by his team of 13 people in Mumbai.
Anant Ambani is the younger son of India’s richest man - Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani. He married Radhika Merchant, daughter of Encore Healthcare CEO Viren Merchant, in a lavish ceremony in Mumbai last night.