The Mamas and the <i> Papas</i>

In polyethnic Los Angeles, where Japanese cooks prepare Jewish-Mexican food for African-Americans and Thai people make Italian food that Salvadorans like to eat, Peruvian restaurants are sometimes the most puzzling of all.

The most famous Los Angeles Peruvian restaurant is, of course, Matsuhisa, the Peruvian-inflected Beverly Hills post-neo-sushi bar that most people think of as straight Japanese even though the chef

douses the fish with an awful lot of garlic. (Chef Matsuhisa spent the crucial formative years of his career in Peru.)

El Carbon, on Vermont, specializes in what is more or less the Peruvian equivalent of the Cuban-Chinese places on upper Broadway in Manhattan, Andean takes on chow mein and fried rice. Don Felix, on Virgil, serves pretty much the same thing as El Carbon, but with the addition of several Italian dishes--the chef reputedly ran an Italian restaurant in Peru.

As in much of South and Central America, the restaurants in Peru are mostly run by cooks of Asian descent. In Los Angeles, what we think of as Peruvian food is often Peruvian-Chinese food, a cuisine inflected by Asian flavors and cooking techniques. It’s what Peruvians expect when they go out to eat, if not exactly what they eat at home.

In a mini-mall on the corner of Melrose and Vine, down the street from the musician’s union and squeezed between a Pioneer Chicken and the local Radio Shack outlet, Mario’s Peruvian Sea Food

Restaurant is as bi-ethnic as they come. The cooks are Asian; the waitresses Peruvian. The walls are decorated with pictures of campesinos and llamas and bleeding Jesuses; above the serving counter sit plaster Japanese good-luck cats, paws raised in greeting. On a wall by the cash register is taped a photocopied Times business story, illustrated with a picture of the new Japanese-descended president of Peru.

Across the street is a well-stocked liquor store where you can pick up a six-pack of Sapporo to drink with your dinner. (Mario’s has no alcohol license, and the house beverage, a plum-colored corn drink violently flavored with cloves-- chicha morada --may be something of an acquired taste. I actually grew to like the stuff a lot.)

The repertoire of Asian-Peruvian cuisine, at least in L.A. Peruvian restaurants,

consists of three dishes, and at Mario’s they’re as tasty as anywhere. Chaufa is Peruvian fried rice, pretty much like a spicy, garlic-drenched version of the standard Chinese-restaurant stuff. Lomo saltado is a salty, delicious stir-fry . . . with limp French fries as the main vegetable ingredient, and plenty of onion, tomato and chile. Tallarin is chow mein made with spaghetti, stir-fried in a hot pan until it chars slightly and picks up a nice smoky flavor you might associate with great

Cantonese chow fun . You can have any of the trio fried with chicken, good shrimp, a spicy melange of squid, octopus and shrimp (the best), or tough, overcooked beef. The Chinese food is fine and everything--better than that in the case of the tallarin de mariscos --but possibly not worth the drive across town all by itself.

Some of the Peruvian food might be: the tiny saucer of hot, guacamole-textured Peruvian chile sauce, aji , that Mario’s brings out with the bread and butter; a huge platter of ceviche , extremely fresh, raw whitefish marinated in lemon juice and a smidge too much seasoned salt; papas a la huancaina, a savory, Op-art-yellow cheese sauce blanketing

sliced, boiled potatoes--the traditional mountain peasant dish is much better than it sounds.

There’s a classic version of the Peruvian shrimp chowder chupe de camarones , a big bowl of chile-red soup, mellowed with milk, thickened with great quantities of beaten egg, and topped with a giant crouton of freshly fried bread. Half a

boiled potato is sunk at the bottom of the bowl. (In a Peruvian restaurant, you’re never far from a potato.) Several big shrimp, still in their shells and barely jelled by the heat of the broth, float at the top. The basic taste is not unlike a shrimp-flavored variation on peppery cream gravy. ( Sopa a la criolla , basically the same thing with beef in place of the shrimp and noodles in place of the crouton, isn’t nearly as good.)

“ Chicharron “ de pollo is something like Peruvian Chicken McNuggets, heavily breaded chunks cooked to resemble fried pigskin, and served with a herbed, citric dipping sauce as vividly yellow as a happy face emblem. And on Sundays, there’s usually tallarin verde , Chinese spaghetti sauced with an intense, creamy pesto and topped with a thin grilled steak. It’s the kind of tri-ethnic dish that could only have originated in Peru . . . or in L.A.

Mario’s Peruvian Sea Food Restaurant, 5786 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, (213) 466-4181. Open daily, from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Visa and MasterCard accepted. Takeout. No alcohol. Lot parking. Dinner for two, food only, $13.50-$20.