Restaurant review, Lima, 31 Rathbone Place, London.

What do we know about Peru? "El Condor Pasa", Incas, Machu Picchu, Paddington Bear, Mario Vargas Llosa and guinea pigs. Only the last-named, however, has any connection with cuisine. Guinea pigs are popular lunch treats on the Peruvian sierra, charcoal-roasted and served with garlic and chilli. (All those years you watched your children's piebald pets in their cages, nibbling lettuce and twitching their noses, and you never thought of them as a bite-size snack? Have you no imagination?) Also traditional are boiled or mashed potatoes, corn tamales wrapped in banana leaves, and ceviches of seabass, scallops or crayfish. And that's about it for Peruvian nosh – or was until recently.

Suddenly nouveau-Peruve is all over London: there's Ceviche in Frith Street, Soho; Tierra Peru in Islington – and now Lima, a collaboration between two entrepreneurial Venezuelan brothers, Gabriel and Jose Luis Gonzalez, and Virgilio Martinez, a Peruvian chef who owns Central, the highest-profile eaterie in the Peruvian capital. After much to-and-fro-ing across the Atlantic, they've opened this colourful boîte in Fitzrovia, in an attempt (Gabriel tells me) "to bring to London what's happening in Lima today".

The first thing they've brought over is colour. The exterior is a lovely Inca blue, the main dining room, designed by Eric Monroe, is all muted beige enlivened with a busy mural. And the dishes, as we'll see, are a visual gallimaufry of their own.

We started, of course, with pisco sours. People speak nervously of pisco sours, as if they induce madness, like absinthe or mescal, but they're only South American grappa gussied up with lime, syrup, bitters and egg whites. The Lima sours are fabulous, though – salty, limey and frothy all at once.

The menu starts with eight small dishes that mingle classic ceviches (fish marinated in citric fruit) and tiraditos (cuts of raw fish somewhere between sashimi and carpaccio) and causa potato dishes, with more familiar hors d'oeuvres: duck with foie gras, artichokes with fava beans. My salmon tiradito, tenderised with tiger's milk (a concoction of lime, ginger, coriander and herbs) was smothered in rocoto pepper, given a line of green samphire and a lick of ginger. It looked gloopy, but tasted sublime, the salmon's flavour miraculously intensified as if it had been surreptitiously having sex under its duvet of orange pepper.

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