Misti Mountain Hop
The food can be pretty good up on the altiplano of Peru, the long, broad plateau in the Andes that was the center of Inca culture: rich potato stews, fresh river trout, roasted ears of giant-kerneled corn with white cheese. In contrast to the cosmopolitan seafood-based cuisine of the port-city capital Lima, Andean cooking is simple and earthy, soul food really, based on tubers, flavored with pungent mountain herbs. Even the beer is great. And though you see plenty of beef on the menus of local restaurants, the classic meat dish associated with the region is cuy , guinea pig, cooked to a sizzling turn.
Cuy sort of makes agricultural sense--guinea pigs are not only cheap and easy to care for, but thrive at altitudes where cows and swine do not--even if memories of childhood pets can render a cuy dinner fairly tough going. It’s not as if anybody’s going to force them on you there: Most sophisticated Limenos have never tasted cuy , and outside family feasts and the bare-bones diners called picanterias , it’s actually hard to find.
In the northern part of the altiplano , they roast the cuy with lashings of garlic and wild mountain herbs; as you get farther south, toward Bolivia, people tend to deep-fry the marinated cuy instead, until the skin is crisp and oily, the meat texture that of thoroughly roasted pork, the whole saturated with the Andean herb huacatay , which is a flavor powerful enough to tame the richness of even this strong flesh. Cuy can be fairly delicious if you can ignore . . . you know.
If roast cuy is often found in the picanterias around Cuzco, the capital of deep-fried cuy might be the mountain city of Arequipa, traditionally Peru’s second city after Lima, a stronghold of spicy stews and traditional ways, in the shadow of the enormous volcano El Misti.
El Rincon Arequipeno may serve only a few dishes from Arequipa, but may be the closest thing to a regional Peruvian restaurant in the Southland. The restaurant, in the Peruvian-rich community of Lawndale, is a sleek strip-mall cafe in the space formerly occupied by the restaurant El Sol, with a giant if unoccupied wine bar, and perhaps fewer pictures of Macchu Picchu than any Peruvian restaurant in America--there are murals of El Misti instead. On a weekday afternoon, the big-screen TV in a corner may be playing Ecuadoran cooking shows or a Peruvian equivalent of “The Price Is Right.” The restaurant, which moved to this spot from a tiny location a couple of miles north, is currently the hottest ticket in the local South American community.
Here is the usual stuff, done very well: pollo a la milanesa , a chicken breast pounded to the width of a legal pad, lightly breaded and fried crisp as a potato chip; saltados , Chinese-style stir-fries of French-fried potatoes with chicken or beef and vegetables; seco de cordero , stewed chunks of lamb, daubed with a tangy cilantro puree and served on a pillowy bed of beans. El Rincon makes what must be the best version of papas a la huancaina in the Southland, firm, boiled potatoes smothered in a mild sauce made with cheese, chiles and egg.
Fried snapper with a citrus-laced chop of onions and tomatoes is crunchy and irresistible as fish ‘n’ chips; mixed seafood fried with beef and vegetables, lomo a lo macho , is dull as a $3.99 Chinese takeout stew. Tallarin verde , linguine sauced with a bland spinach puree, tend to be a little gummy, though the small, thin steak served on top of it has good flavor.
The few regional things, though, tend to be just outstanding. Potatoes ocopa , blanketed with an unusual pounded walnut sauce, has an intriguing, unplacable flavor, probably from a bit of dried shrimp and a dose of the mountain herb huacatay . Malaya , a sort of dehydrated pot roast of beef, is fragrant, chewy, exploding with a sweet-tart aged-meat flavor in your mouth like a fine Sonoran machaca .
And while the menu lists no Arequipa-style cuy , there is the closest imaginable equivalent: half a rabbit marinated with garlic and huacatay , fried until the meat is tender, the skin glossy and crisp, the juices clear, served with a side of the potatoes ocopa and possessing a powerful herbal flavor that will stay with you for the rest of the day. I like fried cuy just fine, but El Rincon’s chicharrones de conejo may be one of the few dishes where a substitute works better than the original.
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What to Get
Potatoes ocopa ; fried rabbit; malaya.
Where to Go
El Rincon Arequipeno, 15651 Hawthorne Blvd., Lawndale, (310) 644-7720. Open for lunch and dinner Thursday through Tuesday. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Beer and wine. Lot parking. Takeout. Lunch or dinner for two, food only, $15 to $20.
