“Our goal is to show the biodiversity, culture and landscape of Peru. That is a theme that we share in all our restaurants,” says Leon.

In 2018, she branched out to launch her own restaurant, Kjolle, while still remaining involved with her and her husband’s flagship establishment.

Art restaurant in Singapore’s National Gallery will host the residency, and one highlight of the menu is a dish titled 3850 masl, which is served in the middle of an 11-course tasting dinner.

The name refers to the number of metres above sea level at which the ingredients were sourced, and in this case the altitude was lung-bustingly high up in the Andean mountains.

Native potatoes are one of the few crops that survive in the thin, Andean mountain air, and they provide a livelihood for the farmers living in this region.

A waiter ceremoniously brings to the table a tray of steaming chunks of clay. He cracks them open to reveal aromatic baked potatoes inside, small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand.

This is the team’s interpretation of the huatia, an Andean earthen oven used to cook tubers underground. Andean clay was flown to Singapore to cook the dish.

A natural earthiness enhances the sweetness of these potatoes, which we peel with our bare hands, the way it is done in the mountains, before dipping the flesh into uchucuta, a piquant Andean sauce made from chillies and herbs.

“We want to show that you do not always have to use luxury produce and you can have a beautiful impact that brings you on a journey to the mountains with just one humble potato. This is an experience that brings you into contact with something that is very natural and real through different Peruvian ecosystems,” says Martinez.

Martinez co-founded an ingredient research centre in Lima called Mater Iniciativa, and also founded the destination restaurant Mil, in Peru’s Sacred Valley, which sources all its ingredients from the ecosystem surrounding the restaurant.

While the pair have held collaborative pop-ups in Singapore before, this time they set themselves a challenge by developing a series of entirely new dishes just for Singaporean diners.

Fans of the couple’s cerebral approach to dining will probably not be surprised at the lengths they are going to.

Martinez’s almost obsessive methodology for hunting down unique ingredients, and Leon’s tireless innovations in the kitchen, were documented in an episode of the Netflix food documentary series Chef’s Table back in 2017.

“If we replicated Central, it would be comfortable, so we said ‘let’s do something different’. Since it is impossible to bring 100 per cent of the ingredients from Peru, as it is not sustainable in this era, we are bringing 100 per cent of our philosophy here by getting inspiration from natural ecosystems and habitats,” says Martinez.

Complementing Peruvian ingredients like corn, huacatay (black mint), hidromiel (fermented honey water), cacao and coffee are a range of high-quality regional products – in particular seafood and meat – that represent different ecosystems and microclimates.

For example, -5 masl is a striking seafood dish comprising ingredients from five metres under the sea, such as crabmeat dressed with crab coral, and carabinero crudo prawns with oil made from their own shells.

The dish 3,280 masl is all about a loaf of bread made from the protein-rich maca root that grows at this high elevation.

For all its simplicity, the bread is chewy, fragrant and comforting, and is complemented with yacon root yogurt and hibiscus flower spread to make for a surprising crowd-pleaser.

For dessert, the team draws inspiration from the high-altitude jungles of Peru. Here, at 1,450 metres (4,750 feet) above sea level, an endemic variety of cacao called the chuncho grows. Chuncho is known for its fruity notes, and in this dessert the entire fruit is used.

The dish includes a salted caramel made from the husk, a sponge of cacao powder derived from various parts of the fruit, cacao nibs for crunch, and a warm cacao creme – all so delicious it makes one ponder how much of this fruit is wasted during the conventional chocolate-making process.

One of the main reasons the pair decided to set up an extended residency so far from home is to expose their kitchen and crew to different places and cultures.

“After the world reopened, there are many curious cooks who would like to travel to a new location and do something interesting. The younger guys really wanted to do this,” says Martinez, who said almost 90 per cent of the team voted in favour of the Singapore pop-up.

Theirs is the third in the Mandala Masters series, which brings culinary residencies from some of the world’s best restaurants to Singapore, following pop-ups from Mirazur by Mauro Colagreco, and Indian chef Gaggan Anand.

Martinez and Leon, who continue to be based in Lima, plan to spend a week each month in Singapore. They have a team of 16 there, with trusted chef Bernabe Simon Padros, head chef of Central and Kjolle, heading the kitchen.

Shining the spotlight on their team as well as the greater community of farmers and food producers is a mission they take seriously. The awards they have won are regarded not as a personal triumph but as a vindication of the group effort it takes to make a restaurant work.

Leon, who was named Latin America’s Best Female Chef in 2019 and World’s Best Female Chef in 2021, says: “I was really happy to receive the recognition because I have been working for many years. So I was proud, not only for myself but for the team because this motivates everyone.

“For instance, the World’s Best Female Chef award which I received during the pandemic – that was a really positive push.”

Martinez adds that with greater fame comes even greater responsibility.

“There’s always mixed feelings [about awards] because gastronomy cannot be labelled. But what is interesting is that it means we are getting recognition also for the people we work with like farmers and producers, so we grow together,” he says.

“It also carries more responsibility because we are a representation of what is happening in our territory.”