The RAE Dictionary says Huarique is a Peruvian colloquial expression that means hiding place. The Peruvian Academy of Language details the current meaning of the word: “Huarique is, above all, a popular restaurant, of quality known to those who frequent it, which does not usually appear in tourist guides and which always maintains prices that do not seem excessive to its customers.” With that definition in mind, Rocío Ascue (Lima, 38 years old) and Diego Barrús (Madrid, 49 years old) opened their restaurant in 2022, Huarique Millof Peruvian cuisine, in its particular hideaway: the town of Vega de Espinareda, in the old mining basin in the north of the Leonese region of El Bierzo. “When we were kids, my father took us to those places in the center of Lima,” remembers Ascue, “very small restaurants that don’t have much renown, but, yes, where they serve you, as people from Lima say in popular slang, very taipa, that is, you come out very full.” In short: “Places where you eat well, delicious, homemade and in abundance.”
She was born in Peru, but at the age of 19 she moved with her family to Barcelona. “I am a chef, I studied a small course in Peru and then I trained at the Barcelona Hospitality School. I worked little by little, I arrived at haute cuisine, and then the break with the pandemic, obviously those of us in the hospitality industry could not telework. As a result, we decided to leave the city, since there was so much uncertainty, and we came to live in Fabero (León), where Diego had a family home,” explains Ascue.
Barrús points out that he has “half a Bercian heart,” because although he grew up in the Madrid neighborhood of Las Margaritas, his mother was born in Fabero, a place she never stopped returning to. “I lived in a fairly humble neighborhood, in Getafe, next to El Ventorro. There was no money to study and from a very young age I had to start working. I was always fascinated by the hospitality industry and getting behind a bar. I debuted at my brother’s wedding in a friends’ pub and work and travel have been like my school,” he summarizes. He is the head of the room at Huarique Molino, as well as the person in charge of the cocktail menu – from the Pisco sour to the very trendy Espresso Martini, at 6.50 euros each – and the coffees. “Here you can come and have a Canarian bar or an Irish bar,” he says, “for five years I worked in the Canary Islands and was in a five-star hotel, where I got into cocktails, and I brought back those drinks and coffees that I discovered there. ”.
That of Rocío and Diego is a story of migrations and travels that have led them to undertake and take risks; to bring the flavors of Lima to the land of botillo. The spiciness, which is noticeable in many of the chef’s preparations, is not strange to the local palate, accustomed to paprika. But since they decided to open their restaurant, she knew that her path was going to be to offer Peruvian food. “At first there were more traditional dishes from the area. And we have octopus, but grilled with an Afro-Peruvian sauce and cassava instead of potato,” says Barrús, “we thought it would be difficult to open our minds to this food here, because we are the only restaurant that does fusion or Peruvian food in 200 kilometers around, but Rocío believed in this project.”
Their menu does not lack tiger’s milk in their salmon tiradito (18.50 euros), the huancaína potato (6.90 euros) or the shrimp and octopus anticuchos (18.50 euros). Ascue’s recipe book comes from family memories, from his father’s dishes: “He is a cook because he likes to eat, not by profession. It is their recipes that I capture with my ideas and with my current and haute cuisine techniques. This is a relaxed, fun project, with lots of colors and joy. My father remembers the old recipes from Lima, where the gastronomy has evolved a lot and is no longer the same, and I take bits and pieces from there… For example, this summer there was a quite successful dish that was a huancaína pasta with grilled prawns, which is a family memory of the dish we made at home on Sundays, with a yellow chili-based sauce. There is no original recipe, it is a custom that each family adapts to what they have or their tastes.”
These popular Peruvian recipes have a lucid presentation, inherited from Ascue’s passage through Barcelona establishments such as Casa Guinart, El Altar or Casa Tejada. “Where I learned the most was when I worked in one of the restaurants of French chef Romain Fornell (who in 2001, at the age of 24, became the youngest chef to achieve a Michelin star) and with Oscar Manresa. Then they together had very private, very reserved projects, in which I was on their teams,” says the chef. But he was also in small restaurants, even one with almost no kitchen. And there, he says, he also learned lessons that have helped him develop his personal project: “I was half vegetarian, half modern and there was only a bread heater, a pot and a cold room. This is how I learned to have more imagination, to reinvent myself and to make my mind not so square.”
In 2025 Ascue and Barrús celebrate a decade together. They met precisely in Barcelona. He had just arrived there after working behind the bar of a hotel in Picadilly, in the tourist heart of London. “I was with a Brazilian friend, who was the one who taught me how cocktails were made there, very different from what I had seen. And they called me to be the head waiter at a place in Barcelona, and there we met and after a month or so we started dating.” At first they did not think about starting a business, that came with the pandemic and the change of pace that came with moving to the El Bierzo region. Vega de Espinareda is, in fact, the gateway to the Ancares Leoneses Biosphere Reserve, declared in 2006 by UNESCO, an area that stands out for its natural wealth and heritage, with capercaillie, century-old chestnut trees, hillforts and roe deer. “We were interested in the idea of taking a break, no longer being in the hustle and bustle of a city, of starting over there,” says Ascue.
The restaurant was not his first idea: they started making sweets – in their menu they maintain two of their first proposals, his and the Guinness and chocolate cake. foot of her lemon—and selling them at home. “It took us 40 or 50 minutes to take a cake to the most remote town of El Bierzo, but that lifted our spirits, we saw that we could do things together.” That’s why they started looking for a place to settle. They considered different options, but an old stone mill—topped by the characteristic slate roof of the area—located on the banks of the Cúa de Vega de Espinareda River, immediately caught their attention. “I knew it from my family, it was a place where people came to eat bravas and sausage boards, next to the river there was a nightclub… It is a very charming place, a mill where rye was ground in the old days,” explains Barrús. In its two rooms 60 people can eat and they wanted the bar to also be a space to try their dishes. “And we have a 600 square meter terrace, but you don’t eat there, it’s for drinks and music,” says the head waiter.
Music is central to its proposal. “Huarique is music, food, fun and having a good time,” emphasizes Barrús. In this town, a rock and roll festival has been held at the beginning of summer since 2022, Thorn Fest. And the Huarique Molino terrace hosts concerts in the afternoon. It is another project designed to promote the area, Barrús and Ascue emphasize the importance of creating networks so that projects are created and there is no need to talk about depopulation or lack of basic services.
“We are in contact with other people who have small projects and we work hand in hand,” she says. “I worked in the mines as a mechanic for three or four years and I met there with Pablo, a guy from Sancedo who was a welder and now he has returned here after working in Ribera del Duero as a winemaker and we organized tastings together,” Barrús gives as an example. It refers to the Cepall Wineries, whose wines are not missing from the Huarique Molino menu. “We need more support so that more people come and do more things,” claims Barrús, who maintains that it has not been easy to maintain his restaurant in a town of about 2,000 neighbors. “The first year there were days when not a single euro entered the till and no one came through the door. We decided to open in winter only from Thursday afternoon until Sunday. But now people scold us and tell us why we don’t open more,” he adds. Now, he acknowledges, “word of mouth is working and there are people from Coruña, Salamanca or Madrid who take a weekend getaway and come to eat at the restaurant.”
