Lima and I got off to a rocky start. My first time there was when the restaurant was in San Miguel’s Mercado Carmen. I asked the very charming server to bring me the dish that the chef was most proud of. The chef’s recommendation was Linguine Huancaina with Cortes de Solamillo. A pasta with sirloin steak topped by Peru’s contribution to the short list of the world’s great sauces? A great suggestion, I thought. But I thought wrong.

The linguine was perfectly cooked. The sauce was perfectly crafted. But the beef was wear-your-jaw-out tough. I thought that might be my last trip to Lima.

The other night though we were desperately looking for music, early music, and early music isn’t easy to find in San Miguel de Allende (or anywhere else). But there in an email was news about live classic rock, from 5:00 to 7:00, at, you guessed it, Lima.

Lima has moved down the street and up in the world in the year or so since my first visit. They now occupy a much bigger and much, much better location on a second floor on Salida a Celaya.

There was one table for two on the patio that wasn’t occupied or reserved. We sat down and ordered our drinks. Sauvignon Blanc for Don Day’s Wife. Eggs for me. Eggs, you’re probably wondering. Yes, eggs.

As much as I like bacon and eggs or sausage and eggs, there is another egg dish that ranks right up there with them. It just happens to be Peru’s national drink and, when in Lima, and when they’re 2 for 1 between 5:00 and 7:00, I drink my eggs in Pisco sours.

The band, The Musick Brothers, was good, very good. They played our kind of music, The Beatles, Stones, The Police, Tom Petty. We played name that tune during their intriguing intros. We ordered another round of drinks. We were getting hungry. We decided to split a starter.

The menu at Lima is big, big enough to come in a binder. It’s a tough menu to navigate. Just in the appetizers, there are six different causas, three different tiraditos, five different ceviches. There are photos to help but they don’t really help. I did what most confused men would do. I said, “Why don’t we have exactly what you want tonight, Honey”, in a tone of voice that would make her think she was being treated extra special.

I wasn’t exactly happy with her choice, Ceviche al Olivo. Don Day’s Wife is a bit of an aceituna addict. She puts olives on most of her pizzas, olives in many of her pasta sauces. I was a little worried that the olives might fight the flavor of the fish in the ceviche but I had passed the peso to her so couldn’t really argue.

The bowl arrived. I did a color search for jade green or purplish black. No visible sign of olives. I scooped up some of the juice from the bottom. Just the tiniest hint of olive in the flavor. I looked at Don Day’s Wife and gave her the old English nod and a wink. She grinned.

A pisco sour is Peru’s national drink. Ceviche is Peru’s national dish. Ceviche in leche de tigre is Peru’s tastiest treatment of its national dish. All of Lima’s ceviches are in leche de tigre or, in English, tiger’s milk.

Peruvians don’t just drink their leche de tigre from bowls of seafood, they drink it straight out of glasses. Pisco sour may be Peru’s national drink of the evening but, on mornings after, it steps aside for tiger’s milk. And every Peruvian chef I’ve either known or known about has taken pride in their leche de tigre recipe.

As we began to scoop up the fish (robalo, I think), the shrimp and the octopus that were swimming in the tiger’s milk, I made a guess at what went into Lima’s chef’s version of the marinade, a guess at what was filling my mouth with this wonderful umami taste.

Almost all leches de tigre contain lime juice, onions, peppers and salt but then there might be garlic, celery, coriander, ginger or almost anything else. I asked Lima’s chef, Sebastian Soldevila de Ugarte, what ingredients went into his tiger’s milk, what gave his leche de tigre such a delightful combination of flavors.

“For olive tiger milk we use a light fish broth, a Peruvian olive base sauce (a secret), salt, lemon, and a habanero sauce to give it a little heat, cilantro to give it freshness, and a touch of ice to lower the temperature”, Sebastian (the one in the fancy apron) told me.

The tiger’s milk in a ceviche is there not just to add taste, it serves a practical purpose, to “cook” the raw seafood. I’ve known chefs to leave the fish in the marinade for 15 minutes, for an hour, for three hours, even overnight and I’ve tasted results that have been too acidic and too vinegary. The seafood in our Ceviche de Olivo was, like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right. I asked Lima’s chef, how long he leaves the seafood in the milk.

“Around three to five minutes”, replied Sebastian, which is about as short a “cooking” time as I’d ever heard of.

There was one more question that I had for the chef. The octopus was extraordinarily tender which is no easy task. Surely it wasn’t just his tiger’s milk that had made the meat so supple. I asked Sebastian Soldevila de Ugarte if he’d share his secret.

“First I freeze it to loosen up the fibres, then I plunge it in and out of boiling water two separate times, then leave it on a high heat cooking for about an hour and a half…and one special tip, add a little rice or potato to the water”, he replied.

Intricately sliced and fanned avocado, crisply, crackling corn and a swoosh of spicy sweet potato make good companions to the seafood in the bowl.

At $350 pesos, the Ceviche de Olivo seemed a little pricey at first for a starter. But it wasn’t. There’s more than enough for two. Enough that you may not even need a second course.

“So what made you come back a second time to Lima?” asked Pia Rivasplata, owner of the restaurant.

“It was the music”, I replied, but next time…and I’m guessing many times after that…it will be the food.”

Lima is located at Salida a Celaya #6 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The restaurant is open from 1:00 to 9:00 pm, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; 1:00 to 10:00 pm, Thursday through Saturday.