Best of Lima - Your local precio fijo

Not my local, but illustrates the point. Plus, I would
feel like a berk taking a photo in the local...  

Fixed price restaurants. All over Peru you'll find a line of little eateries, chalkboards out the front offering more or less the same thing. Fortunately, the same thing is cerviche, chicken broth, tamales, humitas, lomo saltado, roast chicken, with drinks, for about $2. Best of the best is, fortunately, about half a block from where I work, and I'll add a real photo when I don't feel like a ponce for producing a camera-phone.

These are strictly working men's places, but as a gringo, I've found that the transition from stared-at-novelty to totally-ignored-local is about five minutes. Men's worlds they may be, but they are strictly the domain of la madrina - the Godmother. Like a good landlady in your local pub, a decent madrina will shift her clientele with efficient ruthlessness from table to table in order to pack in the next hungry customer, but without a hint of commercialism. People need to eat, her body language states. You're 2 people and here's space for 4. This might well be the third time you've moved in four mouthfuls, but you are now sitting here. Where I've moved your bag. The regulars are used to this, and have perfected a technique of moving without disrupting the fork to mouth rhythm that lesser men should not try lest they lose an eye.

Entertainment comes in various forms. Guaranteed is a TV blaring Peruvian telenovelas: soap operas so dripping in cliches that it's impossible not to get dragged in to the melo-oh-so-much-drama. The lead ladies routinely get shot or slapped by ponytailed men whose biceps prevent them from buttoning their shirts. Presumably the layer cake of make up makes these made up maids on the make bullet proof. They're always there the next week.

Seamlessly transforming into a place to get some cervezas down your neck as soon as the main courses have finished. The telenovela gives way to football, either a violent game in a half empty stadium or a replay of a superclasico from the 80s, flickery screen, bad goal celebrations and tickets strewn across the pitch.

Take the best of your working man's cafe in the UK, add food that's better that it has any right to be, then magically turn it into a pub as soon as you've finished your lunch without even moving your arse. Well, unless madrina tells you so.

All that. For about a quid fifty.