Some day, some day, we’ll get to all the 200+ Peruvian restaurants in town…. a few at a time. For the moment, a trio more from the barrio of Once.

 

Las Palmeras, Pasaje Carlos Gardel 3131, Once – Taking over the space that was Larco-Mar, with no changes to the decor, other than replacing black tablecloths with red ones. As a first shot, we dropped by one day and tried the menú ejecutivo, and to be honest, we weren’t that impressed (220 pesos/person). The soup, a rice and vegetable soup with a few pieces of chicken, had more rice than soup, and was almost a meal in itself. It was reasonably tasty, albeit a tad salty. The two main course options, on the other hand, were less successful. A pescado chorillano was an overcooked, tiny fillet of fish, topped with a bunch of onions and peppers, and a tallarines saltado con lomo was a big pile of overcooked noodles, a few pieces of beef, and drowning in soy sauce. The fact that our waitress came over three times to ask us, not, “is everything okay?” or words to that affect, but, “are the dishes any good?” was a bit worrying.

So, why did we go back? Not really sure. Maybe it was because we just wanted to like it more than we did. But we gave it another shot and decided to order off the menu. An arroz con mariscos had great flavor, in fact, the sauce coating the rice was absolutely delicious, but the mariscos, the shellfish, were just lacking (540 pesos). That huge pile of rice, which ended up being half my lunch and half Henry’s dinner, later, had maybe a dozen tentacles of calamari, four or five mussels, and one small prawn. The seco de cordero, again, had great flavor, but the lamb was almost half fat and bones, very little meat (510 pesos).

So, when it comes down to it, nothing bad, we just weren’t impressed. It’s kind of the food we might expect in a little hole-in-the-wall, in a fancy ambiance with a higher price tag.

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Chifa Lio San, Av. Hipólito Yrigoyen 3101, Once – What is a chifa? Over time, I’ve talked about various elements of both Chinese and Japanese influence on Peruvian cuisine. The latter shows up mostly, these days, in nikkei style food, often in creative sushi bars and similar sorts of food. The former comes mostly from a strong Cantonese influence where a population of Chinese who came into Peru in the late 1800s started out trying to recreate dishes they knew from back in China, using local ingredients. Over time, that became almost codified into a sort of fusion cuisine that has resulted in a menu that is now a beloved part of Peruvian culture.

It is near count-on-able that a chifa (which is a shortening of chi-fan, or “eat rice”, what a casual restaurant is called in Chinese, the first restaurant officially called one was in 1921, a place called Kuong Tong in Lima, owned in part by the Peruvian consul) has a menu that includes a variety of chaufa (from chau fan, or fried rice), a variety of noodle sautes (basically lo mein, or soy sauce stir-fried noodles), and then a few well known dishes, like aeropuerto, which is a combo plate of those two, fried rice and soy sauce noodles; several dishes that involve wontons, from simple plates of fried wonton dough, often without filling, sometimes with, to the more elaborate kam lu wonton which is a sweet and sour dish of mixed meats, vegetables, and crispy wontons; and, a variety of different other stir fries…

…one of the most beloved is taypa (or taipa, or taypá, variously claimed to be derived from a Chinese term meaning either abundance or “well served”, but I haven’t found a Chinese word that fits – it is the Cantonese name for one of the islands of Macau), sometimes labeled as taypa al wok or taypa a la plancha, depending on whether it’s cooked in a wok or on a griddle. It’s actually one of my favorites, but rarely seen here in BA, and for some reason, I’ve never seen it served here as an individual dish, it’s always a “family size” dish. But I decided to order it and just bring the rest home. Lio San’s version is really quite good – it’s a soy based stir fry of a whole bunch of ingredients – beef, pork, chicken, prawns, calamari, fried tofu puffs, broccoli, tomato, and onions. It should be noted, that may be a different combo than you’d get at another place – taypa is basically just a melange of different meats and vegetables stir-fried with a good dose of soy, ginger, and garlic. There’s also a version of taypa served tossed with noodles, though despite my fondness for pasta, I prefer this version, with rice on the side. Definitely a spot to go back and try more!

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Rincón Trujillano, Av. Entre Ríos 659, Once – This one just squeaks into the barrio by being on the right side of the street. Three dishes for delivery, handled a couple of meals for a day when it was raining and I didn’t feel like going out. Overall, good flavors on everything, they really have their seasoning down. But there were problems with the cooking of each of the items. The papa rellena was the best of the three, a fried mashed potato football filled with a mildly spicy ground beef mixture. The only real issue with this one is they didn’t drain off the oil/grease from the cooking – as a guess, they just let it cool, let the grease harden, and then packed it inside the potato ball. But when hot, the inside was just swimming with oil.

The mollejitas, or chicken giblets, were the worst. The thing is, to cook an organ meat like this correctly, you either have to slow cook it until tender, or parboil it until tender before stir-frying it. They didn’t do either. These were clearly just sauteed straight out. They were as hard as a superball, near impossible to eat, and, while having a good flavor, the huancaina sauce on the potatoes had split, so it was grainy.

The chicharrón de pollo itself was pretty good. All white meat chicken, boneless, good crust, good seasoning. The issue with this one were the french fries, which were a soggy, sodden mess – they almost seemed like they’d been boiled before frying, they were so mushy. It may have just been the way they were packaged for delivery, but the crust on the chicken stayed crispy, so I don’t think that was it.

So, okay at best. Not going to be on my list to give another shot to.

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Kind of surprising that the favorite of the trio is the chifa spot, and one I’d happily go back to try more – usually those circle closer to the bottom of the barrel.