RESTAURANT REVIEW : Taste of Peru’s Highlands at Machu Picchu in Lawndale

So far as I know, we were eating at the only Peruvian restaurant in Lawndale, and so the two dedicated dentists were telling us about their expedition to Peru. They’d been through the part about setting up the dental clinic and seeing the Inca ruins. They’d just gotten to the pink-skinned porpoises when the dish of fried plantain arrived.

“Aha,” said a dedicated dentist, spearing some plantain with a fork. “Fried bananas. This is Peru to me.”

Plantain, that rather tropical starch vegetable? Well, eastern Peru, where porpoises frolic in the streams, is part of the Amazon jungle. Basically, though, Peru is the chilly highlands where the Incas domesticated the potato, and their descendants still eat vast quantities of potatoes. Sometimes it seemed everything we had at Machu Picchu Peruvian Cuisine came with potatoes.

Take the appetizers. There were papas a la huancaina , potato slices in a faintly peppery cheese sauce, and then there was ocopa , which is sliced potato in a non-peppery cheese sauce flavored with walnuts and an elusive herb called huacataya . (Fortunately, a couple of years ago I thriftily invested in a dictionary of the Inca language for just such an eventuality as this, and I can report that huacataya is simply wild marigold.)

If you’re in the mood for it, this austere cuisine can be very pleasing, like the austere Peruvian music Paul Simon appropriated for his backup a couple of years ago in his “El Condor Pasa” period.

There’s nothing very splashy about it except the little pot of sharp green chile sauce that comes with everything, but it’s good solid stuff that feels right at home in this neat and unpretentious Mom-and-Pop place. You could call this meat-and-potatoes food for the cosmopolitan.

There is one Peruvian dish, though, that is quite distinctive: anticuchos , which are little beef heart shish kebabs. I must say the anticuchos at Machu Picchu are the best I’ve ever had, rich and meaty with a nice grilled flavor, and so tender it’s hard to believe they’re beef heart.

“How about that?” said one of the dedicated dentists. “ Chichi food.” Chinese, that is. Peru happens to be full of Chinese restaurants. At Machu Picchu you can get a South Americanized Chinese noodle dish called tallarines estilo chino: spaghetti served with beef, onions, tomatoes, bok choy and soy sauce. Take away the bok choy and the soy sauce and throw in some potatoes, and you have the basic style of a lot of the other dishes, like lomo saltado , which can be made with chicken, beef or seafood.

On weekends there are a couple of exceptions to this solid, Midwestern sort of style. Then you can get rather good fried calamari (chicharron de calamar) or equally good fried mixed seafood (jalea), both with limes to squeeze on them. Even then, though, there’s likely to be some potato on the side.

Machu Picchu is just getting started (so is the new business plaza at Hawthorne and Redondo Beach boulevards where it’s located), and the dessert menu has been pretty limited.

There is an excellent flan of rather stiff texture but a strong caramel flavor, and an OK clove-scented rice pudding.

Someday, though, there will be more, to judge from the specialties listed on Machu Picchu’s business card: alfajores, piononos, picarones, “coconut salad” and . . . banana split.

But dessert is not something you want to discuss with a dentist, much less with two of them. They gave us a look.

“Their teeth are history down there,” they said.

Machu Picchu Peruvian Cuisine, 4421 Redondo Beach Blvd., Lawndale; (213) 370-3929. Open for lunch and dinner Wednesday through Monday. Beer only. Lot parking. No credit cards. Dinner for two, food only, $19 to $37.