Mooncake Lunch Pop-up

Daniella grew up in different culinary worlds. Her roots lie in Ayacucho, in the Peruvian Andes, where her grandmother, who had Italian roots, made exceptional ravioli, and her father shared his knowledge of food with her. When she was around thirteen, he decided it was time for her to spend the summer with her aunt in Lima to learn how to cook properly. This mix of influences still forms the foundation of her cooking today.

Italian slow food and empanadas in Limburg

At the age of twenty-one, Daniella moved to Italy, where she would stay for thirteen years. She started out working as a waitress in restaurants, but she spent as much time as possible in the kitchen, learning from the chefs and absorbing their knowledge. Eventually, she took a job at a hotel in South Tyrol, where slow food and organic ingredients played an important role. That approach inspired her.

When the hotel temporarily closed for renovations, she decided to visit family in Limburg. Because of the pandemic, she was unable to return to Italy. Instead, she began cooking Peruvian food for guests at her cousin’s campsite. She immediately noticed how open the Dutch visitors were to trying something new. In Italy, she had always wanted to cook Peruvian food, but people seemed reluctant to step outside their culinary comfort zone. In Limburg, things were different.

“Bananas?!” people would ask when she offered them her pastries.

“No, EMPANADAS!” she would reply.

Eventually, she founded her street food business, Misky Mikuy. In Quechua, the language still spoken across large parts of the Peruvian Andes, Misky Mikuy means “delicious food.”

The menu Daniella serves during the Mooncake Lunch Pop-up is Peruvian and based on family recipes, with the occasional Italian touch. Italian influences are by no means unfamiliar to Peruvian cuisine. Alongside well-known Nikkei and Chifa dishes, which emerged from Japanese and Chinese migration, Peruvian food culture was also shaped by Italian migrants who settled in the country.

Daniella cooks with locally sourced ingredients, including meat from local farmers and organic vegetables. Alongside chicha morada, the refreshing purple corn drink, she also serves pasado: a traditional Peruvian filter coffee, sometimes accompanied by a piece of Peruvian chocolate.

When asked which dishes visitors should not miss, she answers: “The much-loved street food anticuchos, if we have them as a weekend special. And the pollo playero, a chicken sandwich sold on the beaches of Lima.”

Peruvian food in the Netherlands

For a long time, Peruvian cuisine remained relatively unknown in the Netherlands. The Peruvian community here is much smaller than those in Spain, Italy or the United States. Migration to the Netherlands never took place on a large scale, and many recipes were mainly preserved within families and home kitchens.

That began to change as Peru gained international recognition as one of the world’s most talked-about culinary destinations. Today, you can find Peruvian street food and fine dining in various places across the Netherlands.

Mooncake.nl is the platform of food journalist and writer Jonneke de Zeeuw. She celebrates the flavours of the street, the city and the world – and shines a light on food cultures and the stories behind them through videos, TV segments, books, essays and articles. Her work reveals just how rich, surprising and super-diverse the culinary landscape of the Netherlands has become.