Inka Grill Serves Tasty Family Fare

An upbeat blast of Latin music escapes through the heavy glass doors of Inka Grill whenever one of the waiters makes his way to the restaurant’s patio. Squeezed between a Starbucks and the Edwards movie theater complex, the patio is prime people-watching territory in the huge and fairly new Long Beach Towne Center.

On a nice day, it’s also a pleasant spot to sample lime-drenched ceviche--and then to put out the fire of its fresh chiles with a Cristal or a Cusquena pilsner, both excellent Peruvian beers. Or you could sit in the restaurant’s glass-enclosed dining room, a chic little box smartly decorated with trompe-l’oeil stone walls and heavy hand-hewn floor tiles that suggest a Peruvian country villa.

The lengthy menu, of almost 80 dishes, keeps to simple Peruvian comfort foods, made with the disciplined consistency of a big chain restaurant. Sure, a certain amount of unpredictability can be part of the charm at a mom-and-pop place, but here you’re always sure your calamares fritos will come sizzling and crisp with faintly caramelized edges and that the cream sauce on your scampi estilo Anita will be smooth and free of over-browned garlic bits.

You won’t find the more exotic Peruvian dishes. No beef-heart kebabs (anticuchos), no unfamiliar cousins of the potato and certainly no roasted guinea pig. Still, all ingredients are fresh, and the place thoughtfully provides vegetarian dishes and a children’s menu.

A menu page tells how the restaurant’s Peruvian-born founder, Ana Montoya-Ives, chose family recipes and a few regional favorite dishes for her menu. It also explains the unexpected Asian elements in Peruvian cuisine--yasuki fish and kisijara chicken in ginger and soy sauce, and Chinese fried rice (chaufa de pollo). Peruvian cooking is the sort of cultural blend that could almost have been concocted specifically for the Southland: a Latin-Asian potato-oriented cuisine.

The menu emphasizes Peru’s seafood heritage. One of the most spectacular dishes, chorosa a la chalaca, is a platter of chilled cooked mussels on perfect half shells heaped with chile-lime-tomato salsa and meticulously arranged around a hillock of sweet onions sliced to a transparent thinness. Among the seafood selections, you have a hard choice between the paella-like arroz con mariscos, crammed with beautiful fat shrimp, tiny calamari and fish chunks, and the jalea, sauteed fish smothered with deep-fried shellfish.

Seco de cordero norteno is a huge plate of lean lamb, slowly stewed in corn beer (chicha de jora) until the meat cleaves at a fork’s gentlest twist. At lunch one day I tried the Peruvian national dish, papas huancainas. The thick boiled potato slices in creamy ricotta and mild pepper sauce were bland but easily improved with a splash of green pepper hot sauce (aji).

My entree that day, Juanita’s stew, was a chicken breast pounded pancake-thin and smothered in masses of irresistible chopped cilantro and garlic. And I like the fact that Inka Grill uses good Greek olives to garnish its plates. The one offering that puzzles me is the renowned dish named aji de gallina, a Peruvian specialty of chicken in a creamy sauce that’s usually based on ground nuts. If Inka Grill’s version does contain nuts, I found them hard to detect.

A Dream of Bringing Peruvian Food Into the Mainstream

Montoya-Ives and her husband, Kevin Ives, both food service industry veterans, say they dream of bringing Peruvian food into the North American mainstream, like Thai and Mexican. In just four years they’ve managed to parlay their original 70-seat restaurant in Lake Forest into a four-store chain, jumping the nearly impossible hurdle of convincing commercial shopping center managers, who ordinarily favor major corporations, to bet on a small family business.

This July the Ives will open the sixth and largest Inka Grill, at Olive Avenue and Main Street in Huntington Beach, where they’ll continue to pursue their dream of changing the way Americans eat. At the new location, it is rumored, they’ll even have anticuchos on the menu.

BE THERE

Inka Grill, Long Beach Towne Center, 7563 Carson Blvd., Long Beach, (562) 484-0888. Open 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Sunday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Orange County branches in Costa Mesa, Cypress, Lake Forest and Dana Point. Beer and wine. Parking lot. Major credit cards. Dinner for two, food only $26 to $52.

What to Get: Chorosa a la chalaca, arroz con mariscos, jalea, seco de cordero norteno, ceviche, Juanita’s stew.