Peru publishes its entire taxpayer register as a daily file you can search by street and door number, so every room here was checked against the state this morning rather than against a review site. Two things that will not survive the walk: the pisco sour was not born in the hotel that sells it, and no stop on this road has anything to do with Anthony Bourdain, whatever the internet tells you.
- 1 · The Cold Open
Bar Cordano
Vigilio Botano and the Cordano brothers, all three Genoese, opened this on 13 January 1905 across from the Desamparados railway station and a few metres from the Palace of Government. In 1978 the family handed the business to its own waiters, and the company trading here today is still theirs. The state's own tourist inventory records presidents eating the kidneys in wine here and drinking the house chilcanos, so ask for a chilcano de pisco and a butifarra, the pork sandwich they are known for. What the 1989 heritage listing actually protects is the adobe casona and not the business, and that distinction is the first thing every guidebook loses. Three rooms, marble tables, and granite floors worn hollow.
opened 13 January 1905, owned by its own waiters since 1978 · daily 8am till 8pm, though one listing has it shut Mondays · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
Bar Catedral 1924
Rafael Marquina built this for the centenary of Ayacucho and it opened on 6 December 1924, six hundred men working around the clock for six months. The bar is called Bar Catedral 1924 and the thing to order is the Catedral, a pisco sour on quebranta poured at roughly twice the ordinary size. Two corrections to what we used to print. The little bar called El Bolivarcito is not here any more: that business moved out to Jiron Contumaza around 2019 and trades a block away, having taken the name with it, and our pin was sitting on it rather than on the hotel. And the drink was not born in this room, because the earliest solid printed traces of a pisco sour put it at Morris' Bar on Jiron de la Union in 1920 and 1921, before this hotel had opened its doors. The terrace looks straight down on Plaza San Martin, which is the real reason to come up.
the hotel opened 6 December 1924; the bar took this name recently · the cocktail lounge Sun to Thu 3pm till 11pm, Fri and Sat till 2am · verified Aug 2026 · 🏨 the night ends at Gran Hotel Bolivar Lima
- 3 · The Anchor
Isolina
Jose del Castillo cooked at La Red, the cevicheria his mother Isolina Vargas founded in 1981, and in 2015 he opened this one in her name. It is a taberna in the old Lima sense, which means the drinking is not an afterthought and the portions assume you brought people with you. Order the cau cau with sangrecita and a papa rellena, put a chilcano beside them, and expect plates sized for sharing whether or not you intended to share. There are two houses now and this is the original. On Saturday and Sunday it also opens for two hours in the morning, nine until eleven, which is a separate service and easy to miss.
opened 2015, the second house of a cevicheria founded in 1981 · Mon to Wed noon till 10pm, Thu to Sat till 11pm, Sun till 7pm, plus 9am to 11am at weekends · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
Juanito de Barranco
Juan Casusol came to Lima as a boy from Puerto Eten, learned the trade from a Genoese called Queirolo, and opened a bodega facing the Barranco plaza on 16 June 1937. Allen Ginsberg drank here in the mid sixties with Raquel Jodorowsky, and before him it was Eguren, Martin Adan, Cesar Moro, Ribeyro and the painter Victor Humareda, and no women at all until the late seventies. One correction to what we printed: these are not the original walls. It shut on 28 June 2011 after Casusol died, sat closed for two and a half years while the family argued, and reopened on 7 January 2014 in the unit next door, which is why the number is 270 now and not 274. Ask for a sanguche de jamon del pais with a cold beer, or a chilcano if you want what the poets were actually drinking.
a bodega from 16 June 1937; shut 2011 to 2014 and reopened next door · daily from 10am till 1am, 2am Fri and Sat · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Ayahuasca
The Berninzon family built this as a summer house between 1875 and 1895 and it is enormous, more than twelve hundred square metres, with a symmetrical double marble staircase and Oregon pine that took three years to bring back. It opened to the public in 2007 as a restaurant and in 2008 a group of nightlife operators turned it into what you walk into now. The pisco cocktails run on house macerados of herbs and coca leaf, so ask for the sour made with coca, then the Tunche, a strawberry and passionfruit machacado named after the spirit that whistles in the forest. It is a room after room affair and it runs to three in the morning at the weekend, which is what makes it a last stop rather than a dinner. Miraflores and its beds are ten minutes north.
the Berninzon mansion of 1875 to 1895, a bar only since 2008 · daily from noon till 2am, 3am Thu to Sat · verified Aug 2026