José del Castillo

José del Castillo grew up in a Lima criollo family and worked in Lima's restaurant industry for decades before opening Isolina in 2015 in Barranco, named after his mother Isolina Vargas. His mother was a cook in the Lima criollo tradition — the mixed Spanish-African-indigenous culinary inheritance of Lima's port neighbourhoods — and the restaurant preserves her recipes and those of the broader criollo taberna tradition. Del Castillo is not a fine dining chef in the contemporary sense: he is a keeper of culinary memory, ensuring that the traditional dishes of Lima's working-class neighbourhood kitchens survive the city's gastronomic transformation. Isolina has become one of Lima's most beloved restaurants precisely because it does not innovate — it faithfully reproduces the food of Lima's great criollo homes.