Green Point

Plants held to the pass

The garden plates arrive from a kitchen that treats vegan Peruvian cooking as a subject worth close looking. Green Point in San Blas, Cusco is led by executive chef Fabricio Durand, who founded the restaurant on a philosophy sparked by international work: plant-based Peruvian food free of animal abuse, described in the house’s own terms as full of goodness and hope. The founding vision is stated plainly, in terms of animal suffering, world hunger, environmental damage and health rather than dietary fashion.

Durand’s wider work runs alongside the restaurant, including The Green Stop bakery and a yoga centre, which puts the room inside a broader healthy-living practice rather than beside one. At Green Point, that discipline meets a proposition that can sound simple until the plate lands. Peruvian dishes are reworked without animal products; the kitchen leans on vegetables, grains, pulses, fruit, spice, and heat rather than imitation meat. The open kitchen lets guests watch the work happen, which is its own kind of argument about confidence.

Peruvian forms without imitation meat

The method at Green Point sits in the tension between familiar Peruvian structure and vegan restraint. Tacu tacu, ceviche, ravioli, and the vegan grill carry the menu’s center of gravity, not as substitutions but as dishes rebuilt through the ingredients the kitchen chooses to handle. The restaurant’s cooking classes run daily except Sunday and cover gluten-free baking, raw foods, sushi, and typical Cusquenian dishes, giving the program an instructional edge as well as a service rhythm. That matters in a city where visitors may arrive expecting altitude, stone streets, and meat-heavy comfort, then find a plate built from plants with the same seriousness given elsewhere to stock, char, and fat.

The kitchen’s approach avoids faux-meats and works instead through texture, temperature, acid, and presentation. Wood fire and grill smoke appear in the cooking; breakfast can move through pancakes and quinoa porridge, while lunch and dinner stretch toward dumplings, ramen, pizza, samosas, pad thai, bread, hummus, and Peruvian plates. The breadth is part of the point. Green Point is not a narrow doctrinal table. It is an all-day vegan restaurant using Peruvian flavor as a base and international forms as working material, and reviewers report mushroom dumplings and tacos that read as themselves rather than as replacements.

The covered garden as a working room

The room softens the discipline without hiding it. Greenery and fruit trees sit around a covered garden at Carmen Bajo 235, with indoor and outdoor tables set close enough to make the pass feel present but not theatrical. During the day, the patio reads as a cool pause in San Blas; by evening, candles and small lights draw the plants inward and the plates carry more contrast. The noise stays low enough for the details to hold. A sauce can be explained. A kombucha can be tasted before it is chosen. A dish can cross the room without losing the shape the kitchen gave it.

There is a particular kind of confidence in a restaurant that lets plants do the visible work. At Green Point, the counter, the garden, and the pass are all part of that argument, and the staff working in view are part of the room rather than hidden behind it. Tacu tacu in the San Blas garden brings together the craft and the concrete plate.