The Briefing:
- Cholapink will open at 32 Spring Street in SoHo, Manhattan — a 60-seat fast-casual spot with a menu built around Peruvian anticuchos on a live grill, alongside ceviche, arroz chaufa, and a house Pisco Sour.
- The restaurant is co-founded by Puerto Rican reggaeton legend Daddy Yankee and Lima chef Jaime Pesaque, whose flagship restaurant Mayta currently ranks No. 39 on The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025.
- British investors initially brought a Mexican restaurant concept to Daddy Yankee; he insisted the concept be Peruvian instead, and the investors subsequently traveled to Lima and recruited Pesaque as executive chef.
Daddy Yankee's most recent business move has nothing to do with music. The Puerto Rican reggaeton icon co-founded Cholapink, a fast-casual Peruvian restaurant at 32 Spring Street in SoHo, Manhattan — a 60-seat space where anticuchos, Peru's marinated grilled street skewers, lead a menu that also features ceviche, arroz chaufa, and a Pisco Sour made with lime, orange bitters, and pink sugar. His partner in the venture is Lima-based chef Jaime Pesaque, one of the most decorated voices in contemporary Peruvian cuisine.
The opening (October 28, 2026) arrives at a moment when Peruvian food is pressing harder than ever into the American mainstream. The question Cholapink raises is whether celebrity visibility and a fast-casual format can accomplish what decades of high-end restaurants have not — make Peruvian street food a daily habit for American diners rather than a special occasion.
The Business Pivot That Started With a Rejected Concept
The origin of Cholapink runs through a negotiation that could have gone an entirely different direction. According to Mercado Negro's reporting, a group of British investors were looking to build a celebrity-backed Latin restaurant in New York and approached Daddy Yankee about headlining the project — with a concept initially centered on Mexican food. Daddy Yankee rejected the pitch and insisted the concept be Peruvian. The investors agreed, traveled to Peru, and after meeting with several chefs, selected Pesaque to lead the kitchen. Chef Pesaque himself later recalled how the group arrived at his door: they had come with Daddy Yankee already committed to a Peruvian vision, and "we ended up doing it together," he said in remarks reported by Perú21.
That selection brought formidable credentials to the project. Pesaque's restaurant Mayta, in Lima's Miraflores district, holds the No. 39 spot on The World's 50 Best Restaurants 2025 list and No. 11 in Latin America — making him one of the continent's most recognized culinary figures. At Cholapink, he is not a brand figurehead: he designed and oversees the entire menu as executive chef.
Daddy Yankee's affinity for Peruvian food had already been documented publicly before Cholapink came together. In September 2025, he made a largely unannounced trip to Lima that evolved into a full gastronomic tour. Pesaque guided him through Mercado Santa Cruz in Miraflores, the Barrio Chino's chifa row, and eventually to Mayta itself. The visit left a clear impression: the artist told local reporters that in Peru, "you eat at another level."
Anticuchos at the Center of the Menu
In Lima, the anticucho belongs to the street. Vendors cook marinated cuts over live coals at neighborhood stalls, and the dish carries a working-class tradition stretching back centuries. At Cholapink in SoHo, that tradition is reframed as a fast-casual experience — five skewer options assembled to order on the grill, each representing a distinct axis of Peruvian flavor.
The five proteins span glazed chicken thigh with miso and ají mirasol; beef bistec with smoked ají panca, huancaína sauce, and chimichurri; pork belly with sweet-and-sour rocoto and pineapple chutney; fresh catch with ají amarillo and yuzu aioli; and a vegan option of mushrooms and peanuts with an emulsion of Peruvian herbs, including Amazonian varieties rarely encountered in U.S. kitchens.
Beyond the grill, the menu draws from Peru's broader culinary canon: house ceviche with classic leche de tigre, arroz chaufa, and choclo cremoso a la huancaína. To drink: a muña and mint iced tea with cacao fruit and apple, and the Cholapink Pisco Sour, a house rendition of the national cocktail built with lime, orange bitters, and pink sugar.
In a press statement covered by Forbes Perú, Pesaque described the role of the anticucho in this project: "it's part of my memories, of the markets, of the streets and of daily life." His stated goal for Cholapink is to move Peruvian flavors into a contemporary, accessible register — built for New York's daily pace while keeping the cultural roots that make those flavors distinct intact.
A Space Built Around the Pollera's Fuchsia
The restaurant's name doubles as a design statement. Cholapink references the vivid fuchsia of the pollera — the traditional skirt worn by Indigenous Andean women at festivals and in everyday life — a color that runs through the 60-seat interior as the dominant visual thread. Pink microconcrete surfaces extend across the space, set against wood, stone, and corrugated metal. Artisan elements drawn from Andean textile traditions appear throughout.
The design concept, as reported by Forbes Perú, is built to carry two identities simultaneously: the visual and material memory of Peru alongside the forward-moving energy of SoHo's creative corridor. The result is a dining room where the food and the physical space tell the same story.
What Cholapink Means for Peruvian Food in the U.S.
Peruvian cuisine's international rise has historically run on fine-dining rails. Gastón Acurio's restaurant empire — spanning multiple continents — placed Peru on the global culinary map, and restaurants like Mayta have extended that prestige into the present. But access to Peruvian food outside established Peruvian-American communities, or outside high-end price points, has remained uneven in the U.S. Fast-casual Peruvian food with the visibility to reach non-Peruvian diners simply has not existed at scale.
Pesaque framed Cholapink as a deliberate departure from that pattern — a format designed for frequency rather than occasion dining, anchored in the street-food tradition that makes Peruvian food democratic in its home market.
Daddy Yankee made the project's ambition explicit in a press communiqué covered by Metro Puerto Rico: "Now it's New York's turn to discover Cholapink." Whether a 60-seat fast-casual location in SoHo can move the needle on Peruvian cuisine's U.S. footprint is still an open question. But the combination of Pesaque's culinary authority, Daddy Yankee's cross-cultural reach, and a volume-driven format may represent the most commercially serious push yet to bring Peruvian street food into the American everyday.
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