Senzo

Cacao butter at the Cuzco pass

Cacao butter comes to the table with the bread before the longer sequence begins. Virgilio Martínez, chef-owner of Senzo in Cuzco, works here with the same Peruvian-centered discipline that runs through his wider group, but the station is set inside Plaza Nazarenas rather than Lima. The gesture is small and telling: bread, fat, aroma, the first contact between the kitchen and the room.

Martínez’s formal base came through Le Cordon Bleu, followed by service at Lutèce in New York City and Can Fabes in Sant Celoni. Executive responsibility followed at Astrid & Gastón in Bogotá and Madrid, where Peruvian identity had to travel without thinning out. In 2008 he became chef-owner of Central Restaurante in Lima; in 2012 the group expanded with Senzo and Lima, adding Cuzco and London to the map. Senzo belongs to that expansion, but it asks a different question from the flagship: how a high-end Peruvian kitchen works when the hotel garden, the courtyard, and the Andean setting sit close to the plate.

A Peruvian menu set near the garden

The kitchen’s stated approach is modern, with both à la carte and tasting menu formats. At Senzo, that means Peruvian ingredients shaped for a formal room, with foraged material from the hotel’s gardens entering the work alongside Andean flavors. The house names breads with cacao butter and a chocolate texture dessert among its signatures, placing cacao at both the opening and the close of the meal.

The broader method is consistent with Martínez’s practice at Central Restaurante, where Peru’s varied landscapes organize the tasting menu rather than decorate it. Senzo does not publish the full internal grammar of its kitchen, so the clearest reading comes through the details it does state: garden sourcing, modern technique, a curated wine program, and a beverage focus that gives pisco its place beside wine. The discipline is not a catalogue of novelty. It is the handling of local material under fine-dining pressure, course after course, with the pass holding the line between place and polish.

Bare wood beside the pool

The room keeps the frame restrained: bare wooden tables, simple comfortable decor, a quiet register, and an atmospheric courtyard by the pool. Service is formal, but the setting avoids theatrical weight. The counterpoint matters. Cacao butter and garden-foraged ingredients can become ornament in the wrong room; here they sit against wood, water, and a dining room scaled for intimacy.

That restraint gives the kitchen room to work. The pass does not need noise around it, and the dining room does not need to announce the Andes in every surface. Senzo’s craft is held in the sequence: bread with cacao butter, local produce shaped by modern technique, pisco and wine in support, and the final chocolate texture dessert at Plaza Nazarenas.