Wayta - El Chef Andino — Restaurant in Huaraz

🚩 Do not go here unless you have a lot of time to wait for food (50-60 minutes) or want a true fine dining experience.

Wayta is a restaurant that serves beautifully prepared “fine” cuisine for an affordable price. However, this is at the cost of slow, mediocre service.

I arrived around 8:00pm after a long day of hiking and wanted a large dinner to finish off the day. After filtering nearby restaurants by the highest reviews, I decided to go to Wayta because they had nearly 5 stars at the time. When I entered, I had to seat myself because there was only one employee (the chef). After roughly 20-25 minutes, the chef came to take my order and I chose the Lomo Saltado (not pictured) and an Andean green pasta appetizer (pictured below). Cooking and serving the food took another 35-40 minutes. The food itself was beautifully plated, however the taste was nothing exceptional. The Lomo Saltado dish in particular was overly salty and the fries were soggy due to being mixed with the beef stir fry. Overall, I was left feeling unsatisfied due to the long wait time and underwhelming food taste.

My suggestion is that the chef (owner I’m assuming) should hire at least a waiter, so he can focus on the food preparation. While I was waiting, one foreigner left without paying for his food and another table of four left as they waited almost 30 minutes without being served. He was very nice though and you could tell he was struggling to do everything...

In short: the food is great, and this place deserves every success. However, things become bizarre... read on.

The food is great, innovative and absolutely stunningly presented. Peruvian classics with a modern twist are available, and are delicious. I very much recommend you give it a try.

The service is a little strange however! The staff are all lovely, but they can forget dietary requirements, which can leave one only receiving one’s meal (which needed to be sent back to be re-made) when everyone else has finished.

Also, in one notable occasion, we asked for the dessert menu, which was duly provided. We tried to order a couple of desserts, each of which was “not available” before we asked which desserts actually were available. The reply was “none of them”. It begged the question as to why the dessert menu was provided in the...

Food is really good but the service is tragic. After almost month in Peru and countless restaurants, from street food to expensive dinners I think Iam quite used to the way it works but I didnt saw anything like this before. Waiter was basically randomly throwing our food on the table without further explanation. He usually just state that its quinoa, but almost all foods we ordered were from quinoa 🤣 Therefore we were very confused what is what. He was ignoring our questions and when my friend get vegetarian food with meat he absolutely didnt want to talk about it and basically he was running from us 😅 Definitely not...