Ten years ago, Nashville had no Peruvian eateries. Today there are three. Leche de Tigre is part of The Wash, the popular group of micro restaurants on Gallatin Avenue. Limo is a more upscale spot on Fatherland with a minimalist, brightly lit dining room. Panca, in the Plaza Mariachi complex on Nolensville Pike, has been around longer, and has a more laid-back, sports-bar feel.
Two more Peruvian eateries are reportedly in the works, including a food truck featuring Peruvian-Chinese fusion, and Chotto Matte, a high-end Japanese-Peruvian concept designated for an eye-popping 11,000-square-foot space in the gleaming new tower at 1221 Broadway.
You could be forgiven for mistaking Peruvian-Asian fusion for another gimmicky new culinary trend, but both Peruvian-Chinese (called chifa) and Japanese-Peruvian (nikkei) are part of Peru’s rich culinary history. It hasn’t always been a pleasant history, and includes conquest and colonization, slavery, indentured servitude, and periods of both in- and out-migration during economic crises and periods of authoritarian rule. But as we know well here in the South, however problematic the cause, that sort of churning of humanity tends to mash disparate cultures together in ways that create interesting and innovative food.
The menus of Nashville’s three Peruvian spots certainly reflect this patchwork of cultural influences. All three restaurants, for example, feature versions of the Peruvian staple lomo saltado, a wok-cooked stir-fry of steak, onion, tomato and cilantro over rice, often flavored with pisco and amarillo peppers, sometimes served with plantains — so it’s a Chinese-style stir-fry flavored with Peruvian alcohol and peppers, served with a fruit native to Africa. Leche de Tigre adds another cultural element by also offering the dish in the form of a taco, and another by converting it to a sandwich on French bread. (The Scene rightly named it the city’s best sandwich in 2023.)
Lomo saltado at Leche De Tigre
Limo and Panco also serve the Italian-influenced tallarines verdes — linguine tossed in a creamy, bright-green pesto sauce, then topped with a pounded grilled steak — and tacu tacu, a West African-inspired crispy cake of beans and rice, usually topped with meat and a fried egg.
The story of Peruvian cuisine begins with its Indigenous cultures. The best-known and best-documented were of course the Inca, who emerged in the 1200s and terraced Andean mountainsides to domesticate potatoes, beans, maize, peppers and quinoa. They also came up with their own process of freeze-drying. Spanish colonization in the 1500s brought rice, onions, olives, garlic, citrus, wine and livestock like chickens, pigs, cattle and sheep. Remnant Moorish influence in Spain brought Middle Eastern and North African spices and cooking techniques to Peru. Spanish slaves from West Africa brought plantains and okra, along with Creole traditions like caked rice and slow-cooked stews.
After Spain abolished slavery, a wave of Chinese and Japanese immigrants came to fill the resulting labor shortages on cotton and sugar plantations. Both cultures today are a small percentage of Peru’s population, but they’ve had an outsized influence on Peruvian food (and its politics). The Japanese introduced octopus, noodles and tempura-style light frying. The Chinese brought ginger, soy sauce and wok-fired preparations like stir-fried rice.
Meanwhile, all of this cultural crossbreeding transpired in a country with astonishing biodiversity. Peru sits at the intersection of the Amazon rainforest, the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean, where, despite the tropical latitude, the Humboldt Current serves up a bounty of coldwater seafood to the coast. Peru is home to the ancestral plants of domesticated tomatoes, quinoa and potatoes. (The country produces about 3,000 varieties of the tuber.)
Chaufa with chicha and Inca Kola at Leche De tigre
Perhaps the best embodiment of Peru’s rich culinary heritage is ceviche — the curing of raw seafood in citrus and salt, typically with onion, chile peppers and a wide variety of other ingredients. It’s the national dish of Peru, where it has its own holiday.
“Just about every town in Peru has a signature ceviche,” says Hugo Novoa, president of the Peruvian Association of Tennessee. “In the mountains and highlands, they’ll make it from the trout, and they might add sweet potatoes. In the forest, they’ll use river fish. Along the coast, you’ll get it with every kind of seafood. Sometimes they’ll add fried fish or shellfish.”
The origins of ceviche likely go back to the Moche, a tribe that predates the Inca by about 1,000 years and is said to have cured raw fish in the juice of the tombo, a variety of passionfruit. The Inca continued the concept by marinating fish in chicha, a sweet fermented drink made from maize, or in salt and aji, a green salsa.
“Ceviche used to take several days to cure,” says Marcio Florez, the owner and chef of Limo. “The Spanish brought limes, which worked better than native fruits. Then the Japanese brought the technique we use today, which cures the fish in just a few minutes.”
At Limo, Florez offers seven different variations of ceviche, including a coastal Peru-inspired version with plantain chips and fried calamari, a Japanese-inspired tiradito featuring octopus and sashimi-style fish, and — in a nod to the highlands — a “causa” variety with aji amarillo-flavored potato and crab.
On our first visit to Limo’s minimalist, brightly lit dining room, my wife and I opted for the “Nashville hot” variation, another cultural alteration Florez made for the city he has called home since 2009. It’s made with a soft white fish — whatever is in season — cured with lime juice, fish stock, a spicy pepper called the limo (from which the restaurant takes its name), garlic and other herbs and spices. Limo offers a generous portion, served winsomely in a large bowl with honey-scented sweet potatoes, sliced red onion and choclo, the thumbnail-sized Peruvian corn. It’s less sweet than U.S. corn, so the plump kernels are less about imparting flavor and more about giving a texturally pleasant pop. Toasted corn kernels called cancha provide some crunch.
Arroz con mariscos at Limo
The lime, fish, peppers, warm spices and sweetness meld into a rich, wonderfully complex broth known in Peru as “leche de tigre” or “tiger milk.” It’s a bit like potlikker — a reward to be savored after a meal well eaten. In Peru, tiger milk is touted as an aphrodisiac, a cure-all and a hangover remedy.
The elixir’s namesake restaurant here in Nashville is helmed by chef Roberto Bernabe, who operated the Two Peruvian Chefs food truck with Florez before the two parted ways. It offers the quickest, most casual fare of the three, but still delivers comparable quality. Bernabe also offers several varieties of ceviche. They aren’t quite the “event” that ceviche at Limo can be, but they’re just as tasty. They’re also served in smaller portions (and are less expensive), allowing you to try more than one variety.
At Panca, where a Peruvian flag adorns a wall dominated by large photos of alpacas and Andes mountainscapes, I opted for an appetizer trio of ceviche, fried fish and papa a la huancaína, a dish of boiled potatoes smothered in a spicy, bright-yellow cream sauce. The components complemented one another well. The lightly fried fish was juicy, with plenty of crunch and salt to balance the softness and acidity of the ceviche.
But my two favorite Peruvian dishes were both from Limo. The clear star of all three restaurants was Limo’s chupe de camarones, an exquisite, bisque-like cacophony of flavors and textures. Shrimp, butternut squash, carrots, peas, plump lima beans and tender bites of queso fresco all swim in a lush, laminated broth. Next-best was arroz con mariscos, a Peruvian take on paella studded with seafood, peppers and chalaca, flavored with cilantro and Parmesan. Thanks to a rich lobster sauce, it ate more like a sticky risotto.
Panca is owned by Pedro Polanco, a Dominican immigrant who came to the U.S. in 2004. It served the best pollo a la brasa, the charcoal-fired rotisserie chicken that has become Peru’s most ubiquitous culinary export to the U.S. This dish too is a product of Peru’s diverse cultural history. In the 1950s, two Swiss immigrants living in Lima developed the rotisserie mechanism to cook the chickens in bulk while retaining its crispy skin and juicy interior. Over the years, the chicken was Peruvianized with seasonings like cumin, soy sauce and native peppers. It’s typically served with two sauces — a vibrant verde and a bright-yellow mayonnaise base flavored with paste made from the amarillo pepper.
I lived for 10 years in the D.C. area, where Peruvian chicken spots have been operating for 20 years. Panca’s version was among the best I’ve had.
Pollo a la brasa at Panca
The Peruvian population in Nashville is small but growing. Novoa estimates that the metro area is home to roughly 2,000 first- or second-generation Peruvian immigrants, with most residing in the suburbs, particularly around LaVergne and Murfreesboro. But Peru is also in the midst of a political crisis and a crisis of confidence in its government. In the past, such events have spurred spikes in emigration. Novoa expects that will bring more Peruvians directly to Nashville, and that the blossoming restaurant and cultural scene will attract more Peruvians already in the country.
There can be a chicken-and-egg problem when establishing a new ethnic cuisine in a city that doesn’t yet have it. Restaurants can’t really operate without access to the right ingredients, but there’s no market for those ingredients until there are established restaurants. That’s particularly true of a cuisine like Peru’s, which despite its diverse influences, is distinguished by varieties of peppers, legumes, potatoes and corn mostly found only in Peru.
“When we first started the food truck, we had to drive to Atlanta to get our ingredients,” Florez says. But Novoa and the Peruvian Association of Tennessee began talking to distributors, and eventually established a pipeline. That helped the city’s culinary scene jump from one food truck to three restaurants, with another restaurant and truck on the way.
We concluded our first meal at Limo with an order of picarones, a dessert made of a squash or sweet potato dough shaped into a ring and fried. It’s another dish with rich, fraught and tapestried origins. Because there was no wheat in the New World, Spanish colonists couldn’t make sweet dishes from home like buñuelos — fried fritters. So they re-created the dish with dough made with native ingredients like pumpkin and sweet potato. Afro-Peruvian women would later turn the fritter into a popular Creole street food by shaping it into a ring and serving it with a syrup made from dried sugar cane infused with cinnamon and cloves.
At Limo, the airy fried rings are served with a fig-infused honey. It’s a simple, satisfying bite, but also the product of conquest, slavery and redemption, with contributions from cultures spanning three continents. In other words, a saporous, aptly Peruvian way end to a meal.
