LOS ANGELES READER

October 27, 1995
Long Live the Potato!
 
You’ll Find Great Spuds, and Other Peruvian Delights, at El Rocoto
By Merrill Shindler

Peruvian cuisine is not about to become the Next Big Thing, though it certainly deserves to be. Like the cooking of Thailand, it’s wonderful in many ways — taste, seasoning, texture, exoticism, and healthfulness, to name a few. The cooking of the Andes hits all the right notes for hungry folks on the lookout for some thing different. When Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors arrived in Peru in the sixteenth century, they expected to find a land in which emeralds lay on the ground and temples were paneled in gold. What they found instead was a gentle country populated by Incas, whose, diet was mostly vegetarian, which upset the conquistadors to no end and inspired them to commit as much random ruination as they could. Reading about that period, I got the feeling the ancient Incas were an early version of our own flower children. They ate deer, wild llamas, fish, ducks, and pigs, but those were luxury items; at the heart of their diet were squash, beans, peanuts, tomatoes, avocados, chili peppers, and, above everything else, potatoes.
The potato is native to Peru, though it’s hard to believe it hasn’t always been part and parcel of the cooking of Ireland, Germany, Prance, and North America. (Try to imagine a world without French fries!) It’s one of the few edibles that grow above ten thousand feet; and, since much of Peru is, indeed, way up there, the potato has long been an
essential chunk of the Peruvian diet. In fact it’s probably the first food to have been freeze-dried. Ancient Peruvians discovered that, when spread on the ground, left out in the frigid air over night, and then tram pled to drive out the remaining moisture, potatoes could be kept for months on end.

Those freeze-dried spuds were known as chunu, which was to the diet of the Peruvian highlander what bread is to that of the average American. Over the years, many Peruvian restaurants have come and gone in Los Angeles; some of them actually made dishes using chunu. Most others stuck with regular potatoes; usually boiled, with which they did some wonderful things.
This isn’t strictly a vegetarian cuisine anymore; in fact, it’s distinctly fish- and
meat-intensive, and it’s built around a lot of spice and flavor. Further, the cuisine is filled with all sorts of culinary carom shots. Peru has one of the largest Japan ese populations outside of Japan — the president of Peru is Alberto Fujimori, and Nobu Matsuhisa, of the superb Matsuhisa Restaurant in Beverly Hills, spent many years in Peru, honing his craft. Peru has a sizable Chinese population as well; Chinese restaurants are almost as ubiquitous in Lima as they are in New York. Thus it is only a small surprise that El Rocoto, a wonderful Peruvian restaurant next to a 99 Ranch Market in Gardena, has an Asian staff and a large section on the menu devoted to Chinese-Peruvian dishes. It is a restaurant — in the Michelian term — worth the drive. From any where.

El Rocoto is located diagonally across from the Gardena branch of El Polo Inka, which is a tribute to the Peruvian way with chicken, a way well worth following. Where El Pollo Inka is rather kitschy-looking — with large backlight murals of urban and rural scenes and Peruvian music played on panpipes of various sizes — El Rocoto is almost delicate in its decor, a pleasant establishment with a sort of indoor-gazebo look. The portions are awesome in size, and the prices are so low I kept thinking the waiter had made a mistake on the bill: Nothing on the menu costs more than $7.95.

A proper sampling of the joys of Peruvian cooking at El Rocoto should begin with a bunch of appetizers, particularly a big dish of papa a la huancaina, a sort of primordial potato salad, in which a cold boiled potato is topped with an almost luminescent cheese sauce, sliced olives, and hard-cooked eggs. It’s a meal in itself for the average appetite, especially if you put away a plate of the wonderful sweet bread and biting green salsa that come with every meal.

Another memorable potato dish at El Rocoto is ocopa, which is very much like huancaina, except the sauce is made of walnuts and shrimp. The awesome Peruvian pork filled tamale, properly called a tamal Peruano con salsa criolla, is an over sized relative of the Mexican tamale, with sliced olives and eggs inside and pickled onions on the side.

One of the great creations of South American cooking is ceviche, in which a variety of seafood is “cooked” by the acid in lime juice. El Rocoto’s ceviche mixto is as good as the stuff made at fabled SoCal ceviche bars like El Silencio and Antartica (sic); a sumptuous plate of marinated fish, shrimp, octopus, shrimp, and mussels, flavored with onions and cilantro, with corn and sweet potato on the side. There’s a knockout of a steamed-mussel dish called thorns a la criolla, which is basically mussels buried under a mass of pick led onions — not subtle, but awfully good.

You’ll also find a bunch of seafood soups here; actually, they’re more like stews than soups, and each is as filling as you could want. Especially wondrous are the wildly spicy shrimp chowder called chupe de camarones and the Peruvian equivalent of Manhattan-style chowder, a red soup called parihuela salvaje, made with fish, shrimp, squid, mussels, and octopus. While seated at El Rocoto, you’ll notice a lot of gigantic plates steaming by, on their way to some very hungry people. Platters of saltado de mariscos, for example, a stir-fry of shrimp, squid, octopus, onions, and tomatoes, with French fries tossed in for good measure. It may sound strange to toss french fries with seafood and vegetables, but it works exceedingly well; one bite and you’re hooked. (Variations include saltado tie camarones, saltado de pollo and lomo saltado, all of which follow the same basic style french fries tossed with protein and veggies.) Picante de mariscos is essentially the same thing, but several karmic levels spicier. Tallarin saltado de mariscos has some spaghetti thrown in for the fun of it. Jalea is a feast of many deep-fried things - shrimp, squid, scallops, mussels, and octopus. The menu mentions the dish is good for two. Take the menu seriously.

And then there are those Asian- Peruvian dishes. The chicharron de pollo con nabo encurtido are basically pieces of boneless chicken, deep- fried until they turn into something akin to chicken chips. They crunch loudly when you bite into them. The nabo is pickled daikon, a decidedly Japanese touch. Also available are wantan (sic) frito which is obvious, and ham lu wanton, wontons topped with meat and vegetables.