After 38 years selling Peru’s most popular street food on the streets of Miraflores, Grimanesa Vargas has finally given in to bricks and mortar.

Used to cooking on the street, tonight Tía Grima, one of Lima’s most popular and well-known anticucho gurus, opens her new restaurant. Located just a short distance from her traditional street corner where long queues and traffic congestion were the norm as over 100 people each night tried to get their portion before they ran out, and waits of up to an hour in a this impatient city were quietly tolerated if you arrived too late, the new location will take some getting used to.

A regular guest at Peru’s world renowned yearly gastronomic event, she will run the restaurant with the help of her son, who explains that they were left with little choice but to move with the times – Miraflores decided not to renew their street trading license, partly due to ever-increasing crowds of customers and partly because of an effort to present a more orderly face to the district.

The restaurant cost some 60,000 ($22,000) soles to implement, but they expect to sell no less than 150 portions a day at 10 soles each.

Although some of the atmosphere of good street food has been sacrificed, flavor has not.

“The location is more comfortable for our customers, that’s changed, but the flavor is the same. Nothing’s going to change that”.

Find it at: Av. Ignacio Merino 466 en Miraflores.

Tags: anticuchos, food, miraflores, mistura, streets