Lunch in Lima without the Lonely Planet

Ceviche in Supe

Guidebooks will tell you the food on offer in Lima is some of the best in the whole of South America. We agree, but we did it on our own, and cheaply. So here's three great meals in Lima that aren't in our Lonley Planet.

1. La Lucha - Parque Kennedy. When there are hundreds of restaurants, cafes and snack places around you and people still queue out the door for a sandwich shop, you know it's good. They run a tight ship at La Lucha with excellent efficient service and a quick turnover. The menu is small, so each item is perfect. We had chorizo sandwiches (S8, £2) in fresh crusty white bread and served with a symphony (!) of sauces for dipping - who knew tartare sauce goes with chorizo? And the fat, skin-on chips were great, too.

2. Sakana - Calle Berlin. Another queue-out-the-door place, this time about 15 of them and it was only lunchtime. The reason was a spectacular S10 (£2.50) three-course set meal served with a huge carafe of fresh pressed cloudy apple juice. We'd be happy paying four times the amount for what we got: a chicken caesar salad, poached fish with onion and tomato served with a scoop of rice and sticks of roasted yuca (a kind of root) and orange and chocolate streaked ice cream.

3. Edo Sushi Bar - Calle Berlin. The best sushi we have ever eaten (and Chris has been to Japan!). Not dirt cheap but we got a sweet deal, paying about £23 between us for enough sushi to stuff us both and a few beers. The stuff they serve is imaginative, intricate and unusual. I won't offend the seven years' training the chefs have to do by attempting to get technical in the description, but suffice to say each piece was a work of art. A really tasty work of art.

One of Peru's signature dishes, ceviche, we tried not in Lima but a few hours up the coast in Supe. You want to be right on the coast for ceviche - because it is raw fish. But not raw fish quite in the sense of sashimi - the fish (or seafood, whatever you fancy) is given a good soaking in lime juice and spice, to the extent that the acid alters the composition of the flesh as if it had been cooked with heat. Delicious, but can't say we were expecting them to serve raw fish with crunchy fried banana ...

SARAH