Sunset over Lima

Sunset over Lima.  In the background is the peninsula of La Punta, part of the port city of Callao. To the left is the mass of San Lorenzo Island, long ago a refuge for pirates and today a last haven for seabirds and sea mammals along the city's coastline.

La Huaca Pucllana

Surrounded by a fence, in the midst of Miraflores' modern high rise apartments, there sits a 75-foot tall mound of mud bricks.  This is the Huaca Pucllana (also known in older references as the Huaca Juliana).

The Huaca Pucllana is the remains of a 1,500-year old temple complex of the Lima culture, which flourished in the area centuries before the Wari, and later the Incas, left their mark.

In 1981 sustained systematic archaelogical work was begun at the Huaca, and in 1984 a site museum and "historic-cultural park" were established.  The 37-acre site includes pryramid proper, and a surrounding ceremonial/administrative sector of smaller, interconnected, buildings and courtyards.

Also, occupying one corner of the site, overlooking the pyramid, there is today one of Lima's most highly-regarded restaurants, the Restaurante Huaca Pucllana.

 On the Tuesday of my stay there, Liz and I decided to try the restaurant, joined by my like-named cousin, Juancho.   Having decided on going only that same evening, we were not able to obtain a table on the outdoor terrace, overlooking the Huaca, which is part of the charm of the restaurant.  Instead, we got the last table available, in a corner near the rear of the main room.

The restaurant, with its reputation for well-prepared food and its great location, is a draw for tourists a grade above the backpack-and-hostel crowd, and for Peruvians with foreign guests, and the prices and ambience do reflect that somewhat. 

The main dining room is decorated with ancient oars and feathered capes which, if not original, are reminiscent of the ancients' art.   There is also an enormous bouquet made of an entire dried cotton plant that is quite impressive.  The ceiling is accented with pre-Inca motifs and great rough-hewn wooden beams, supported in turn by similar wooden posts.  All in all, even indoors, the restaurant is quite charming in its attention to keeping with its location on the ancient site.

The service, we found, however left something to be desired.   The waiters seemed rushed and impatient.  Granted, we did arrive in the midst of the dinner rush, and it seems that there was a rather large party was expected and being prepped for, but nonetheless it is the wait staff's job to make every guest feel welcome and appreciated.   More than once our waiter rushed off as soon as he deemed our drink or appetizer order had been placed, leaving us with questions unasked.

The wine guy also kept pestering us about whether we had decided on which wine, if any, to order.   We were waiting in order to ask the waiter for recommendations on pairings with dishes, but as the service was slow, we had to wait, and so did he.

The drinks, it must be said were good.  I had a better-balanced coca sour there that I've ever had anywhere else.  The bitterness of the coca leaves, with which the pisco is infused, was not too evident, nor was the drink overly-sweet as is sometimes the case.

I must also admit, in fairness, that I probably set the restaurant up for an impossible comparison, when I ordered a lomo saltado.   Lomo saltado is, as its name indicates, sauteed beef, cooked with tomato and onion slices, a bit of soy sauce, and french fried potatoes, and served with rice.   The dish is so simple and the ingredients and flavours so well-known that there is not much that a restaurant can do with the dish to make it somehow special.  Huaca Pucllana, in its turn,  did what other upscale chefs and restaurants often do with it, and use expensive, tender cuts of beef and serve the fries on the side of the sautee to keep them crisp, instead of mixing them into the dish as is the wont of home cooks -including myself.

Lomo saltado is a legacy of Chinese immigrants, combining their cooking techniques and flavorings with Andean ingredients, and is a staple of Peruvian criollo cooking.  As such, it is also a staple of Peruvian home cooking and everyone has their own way of cooking it or a preferred cook.   Thus, there is perhaps no way that any restaurant could hope to wow everyone with their lomo saltado or make theirs the "best" one has tasted (an honor usually reserved for Mom or Grandma, I suppose).


We did have fun and did enjoy our meal, but the food, while good, did not stand-out enough to draw us back on its own.  However, what makes a restaurant memorable, beyond competent cooking, is the experience.  In this case, as Liz pointedly noted, the service was not up to what one expects from a Lima restaurant of that caliber and those prices, and did  detract from the experience.

In sum, yes, I'd eat there again, and gladly, but probably not unless were able to sit outside overlooking the Huaca, which is in great measure what the Huaca Pucllana dining experience is all about.




Huaca Pucllana
General Borgoña, cuadra 8
Miraflores - Lima - Peru
www.resthuacapucllana.com

Bocana

Upon my arrival in Lima Liz and cousin Juancho met me at the airport and whisked me off to San Bartolo, to cousin José's restaurant, Bocana.

In a previous post from an earlier trip I mentioned that my uncle Willy had purchased a home in the beach town of San Bartolo.  In time, they were thinking of selling the place as they did not manage to get out there as often as previously, but instead José, along with two friends of his, turned it into a seafood restaurant.

Bocana, like much of San Bartolo, is open only during the summer months, from December to Easter.  I arrived on the afternoon Easter Sunday and, though they had planned on closing down after lunch, they kindly held the restaurant open a few hours longer so I could experience it.

I must admit that I was surprised at the transformation of the spaces.  Inside, one would not readily recognize it as the same house, even thought no structural features were changed or removed (other than a semi-functional dune buggy).  With judicious application of curtains, bamboo accents, plants, and new furniture and wall decor, they have created a warm, inviting, and very pleasant place to eat at or to just enjoy the bar and some music.

The menu turned out to be no less inventive.

The house cebiche is a classic fish cebiche but accented with basil and Bocana's own secret seasoning.  To match it, they had their barman come up with a house drink, the Bocana, a lovely pisco chilcano with basil (pictured at top).

Another hit drink is a sour, the name of which I can't remember, with maracuyá (passion fruit).  It is offered in two variations, using only the juice of the fruit or unstrained, with the whole seeds left in.

The pisco sours, of course, leave nothing to be desired either -unless it's another round of 'em!

Neither does the chilcano de anís estrella, which is a chilcano flavored with star anise.   I believe this drink was first introduced at Malabar restaurant in San Isidro, and it has become a new staple of bars across the city.  It is simple in its preparation -simply substitute star anise-infused simple syrup for the regular simple syrup- yet, as we discovered last year when trying to make it at home, it can be surprisingly difficult to execute well.  Bocana's barman puts out one of the best, most balanced, chilcanos de anís estrella that I've had.

(This drink provided some opportunities for amusement beyond enjoying the drink itself.  As José and his fiancee, Carla, and José's partners were packing up the seat cushions and curtains as we finished our last drinks, Juancho tossed the anise star in José and Carla's direction.  They both immediately jumped, thinking it was a large spider, to peals of laughter from the rest of us.)

One of my favourite ways to start a meal in a Peruvian seafood restaurant is to order a leche de tigre.  Leche de tigre -lit. "tiger's milk"- is the liquid produced when making cebiche, it is tart with lime juice, spicy with ají, and full of fish flavour.  Sometimes served with the addition of a shot of pisco, leche de tigre is a great pick-me-up and, incidentally, can be a quick way to get a feel for the chef's hand at cebiche and Peruvian flavors.

We certainly enjoyed the rest of the meal as well, from the appetizers to the main dishes.   I can't recall anyone saying that they found their dishes wanting in any respect, although I have to admit that I was pretty busy tearing into my tuna loin with an almond crust and fetuccini noodles with Huancaína sauce.

Other dishes that were enjoyed were the seared beef loin with yellow potatoes that several people ordered, and the "Thai rice" with fish chicharrones.

José and his partners have done well in their endeavor, and the restaurant is understandably getting a lot of press lately, having been mentioned or featured in several print and TV reports on the Lima summer beach and gastronomic scene.

I just wish Bocana would be open all year long, so I could enjoy it on my own summer vacations.

Bocana
Mar Pacifico 335
San Bartolo - Peru
www.bocana.com.pe

Went to lunch today with my sisters and my dad.   At his choosing we went to the Casa de España restaurant one block from San Felipe.   It was a favorite of our grandmothers, and I guess my dad was in the mood for some sangria and paella valenciana.

Then we spent a lazy afternoon napping, and with the ladies getting their nails done at one of the salons in San Felipe.   Later tonight we'll be heading out to Barranco and to the La Noche nightclub.

In Lima

Well, it's my third day in Lima and am having a good time so far.  But, of course, that was to be expected.

On my arrival, we headed straight to San Bartolo for an early dinner at Jose's restaurant, Bocana.  The drinks and food were deserving of the rave reviews they had been getting from the rest of the family.   They were actually scheduled to close after lunch on that day and shut down for the winter, but since they knew that a number of the family were coming, several of whom had not had the opportunity to try it, including myself straight from the airport, they kept the place open a few extra hours.

Yesterday we ate lunch at my aunt Betty's ... I'm gonna have to get her spaghetti sauce recipe from her ... and then I headed to the Centro, to Quilca street, to buy  used books, and I walked away with quite a load of stuff that's nigh to impossible to find in the US. 

In the evening I met my dad at Jose Carlos Mariategui Site Museum for a talk on the disagreements between Julio Antonio Mella, Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, and Mariategui in and around 1928.   It was a rather interesting talk but the Q&A session turned  into a shouting match at the end as a former congressman for APRA, the party founded by Haya de la Torre and currently in government, demanded the floor to refute to the refutation of an earlier longwinded dissertation delivered by him, which had brought the rest of the audience to its feet protesting that beside monopolizing the floor, the guy wasn't even posing a question but simply attacking the speaker.   All quite fun!

Countdown..

I'm just a few days away from heading to Lima for my cousin Mariana's wedding.

I'm told that the plan for when I get to Lima is to head straight from the airport to my cousin Jose's restaurant in San Bartolo, Bocana.     I've never been there and that will be on the last day before it shuts down for the winter, so getting a chance to try it makes me very happy.