A few years ago, we got a Peruvian restaurant called Inka Si Senor, and it served a number of Peruvian dishes, but not the rotisserie chicken. Now, I've discovered a modest Peruvian place called the Paradise Grill, advertising "Peruvian and Mexican cuisine." When I asked chef Oscar Lavado, a native of Peru, why he bothered with the Mexican cooking, he simply said, "people come here expecting burritos and tacos."
But that's not the reason to come here. Lavado does his native cooking best, and this is an inexpensive little ethnic find, so more's the pity that the restaurant was virtually empty one evening last week when I visited with four friends. It's obvious from the jump that no one has bothered much about the décor. There's an electronic keyboard in one corner and eccentric chairs with colorful pastel plastic backs, but the walls are unadorned and have a positively lonely cast when the restaurant isn't crowded.
Peru gave the world the potato, and indeed, the Andean country uses the humble tuber with relish. Three potato-based appetizers are worth a shout. My favorite one, ocopa, is a sliced boiled potato blanketed with a Kermit-green hucutay cheese and peanut sauce; there's also one called papas a la Huancaina, where the sauce is cheesier and has the yellow color to show for it; and papa rellena, a softball-size, breaded mashed-potato orb stuffed with beef and olives. Tasty, si. Diet food, no!
I might add that while all these appetizers were going on, the four of us were drinking a Pisco Sour each, from tiny plastic tumblers. Pisco is Peruvian brandy, and this foamy and refreshing drink is sort of the unofficial cocktail of South America. If you want a nonalcoholic Peruvian drink, you could order a maracuja, a sticky-sweet passion fruit juice, or chicha morada, a purple elixir made from mashed purple corn. But I'd have to advise against Inka Cola, Peruvian soda pop that tastes like tincture of Fleer's Double Bubble. De gustibus.
The main courses here can be fabulous. Peru has been heavily influenced by a Chinese immigrant population, and it shows up in two of their warhorse dishes, tallarin and chaufa de carne (or pollo), which are spaghetti and fried rice, respectively.
Tallarin is actually a corruption of the Italian word tagliorini, and Peruvians eat it with chicken, beef or seafood. I had the tallarin de camarones, chock full of small shrimp, redolent of garlic, oil and soy sauce. A week later, I'm still craving it. Arroz chaufa de carne is delicious, too—Chinese fried rice loaded with small cubes of beef, a flurry of green onion and lots of cooked egg. Lavado puts in a little red chili for fun, but if you like more, you can always squirt aji from plastic squeeze bottles brought on request to the table.
From the specials blackboard, try the lamb stew with white beans, if it is available, a rich lamb stew with a powerfully gamy sauce. For Peruvians only, I'm guessing, there is the dish called antichuchos, beef heart on brochette, flavored with a spicy blend of cumin and vinegar.
Perhaps the most popular dish in Peru is lomo saltado, strips of salty beef sautéed with onions and tomatoes, eaten with a pile of French fries. Ceviche de pescado is small chunks of sea bass in a lime-juice marinade; it differs from Mexican ceviche, using sweet potato and fried pieces of corn on the cob instead of salsa and chunks of avocado.
But I'll be back often for pollo a la brasa, an entire chicken served in quarters, with a garlicky, crisp skin and moist meat. This is where Oscar really shows his mettle. It's one of the best roast-chicken dishes in the city.
For dessert, there are alfajores, rich shortbread cookies with a caramel cream filling, and the ice cream called lucuma, made from an indescribable yellow tropical fruit. Peru has never seemed closer to Vegas.