Lima's Taste

In excited anticipation of an upcoming trip to Peru(!), I headed down the street to a local Peruvian restaurant, Lima's Taste, to get a preview of the food. This place has vegetarian options everyday, though, but I'm not so sure I'll find the actual cuisine in Peru as accommodating.

The place is nice but feels very different from other area restaurants...the furniture is all very formal-looking, with dark ornately-carved wooden high-backed chairs, but the walls are painted bright purple and orange with lots of art and some very modern flower arrangements. The service was extremely slow, even before there were many customers, but if you have time for a leisurely meal, it's perfectly pleasant.

They start out by presenting you with a little dish of corn kernels. Our server was silent when she delivered it, but I heard another server, a middle-aged man who seemed incredibly uncomfortable, give a dish to the table next to us and awkwardly state "It's corn. They grow corn in Peru." As if he'd just memorized that fact.

On their menu online they list three vegetarian dishes (one of which is based in a cream sauce, but the others sound vegan) and some vegan-sounding ceviches (mushroom and tofu). However, on the menu in the restaurant, the menu instructs you to ask about the "vegetarian dish of the day" and the ceviches listed were all seafood-based.

Fortunately, the vegetarian dish of the day was the vegetable saltado, which consists of some grilled veggies (broccoli, asparagus, tomatoes, mushrooms, etc) with FRENCH FRIES and some white rice. The French fries are mixed in with the other veggies, and I think it's a genius move on their part. The whole dish has a salty vinegary sauce, and of course that goes really well with French fries! The whole thing was delicious. I was talking for days afterward about how much I loved the French fries in there. It also had a lot of cilantro in it, and I could taste some lime. All together it was a great combination.

I would definitely go back, but I would probably call first to make sure the vegetable saltado is on the menu again...it was so good!