Around Vancouver in 52 Restaurants > Americas > Peru/Colombia
They say that if you go to dinner with food bloggers, you can be sure to be eating cold food. I don’t know about that, but when I was late for a dinner with fellow food bloggers Kim, Elaine, Annie, Mijune, Jessica, I just headed for the table with all the cameras on it. They were gathering El Inka Latin Deli in Burnaby to sample some Peruvian/Colombian fare and the timing fit in perfectly with my project of reviewing restaurants in a “world tour” kind of format.
There was fried cassava, tamales with olive and chicken and BBQ beef heart to start, with a mouth-puckering pickled hot sauce that I put on everything. Kim, who lived in Panama for a lot of his life, did the ordering and I was grateful to him for pulling out the specialties. The first courses were devoured and then came fried seafood, sausage and pork rind and a fried whole tilapia fish on fried plantain with coconut rice. Latin food is heavy in starches and fried foods and this dinner was no different although a token salad of lettuce, tomato and avocado did serve as a bit of a palate cleanser.
The tamales were quite good and we learned from Kim that they are almost always made with cornmeal here, but in Panama they are actually made by grinding whole corn kernels, which makes for a much smoother finish. I was looking forward to the beef heart and it had some nice flavours in it, but the favorite dish ended up being the picada criolla, a bowl of pork chop, pork sausages, fried plantain, fried cassava and potato, although the fried cassava and red onion relish that seemed to accompany every dish did get a bit tired by the end of the meal. At some point we ordered a chicha morada drink which translates as “purple” something. And so it was. It arrived at our table in a pitcher with the explanation that its colour comes from purple Peruvian. The rest of the flavours in the drink (pineapple, clove and unfortunately a lot of sugar) must have been handed down from Inca mix-masters resulting in a concoction somewhere between Christmas and Kool-Aid. I quite liked it but after dinner we were offered some mazamorra morada – purple corn pudding similar to the drink – that I liked even better.
Some of the dishes weren’t to my taste (the tilapia in particular I could have done without) but mostly the food was prepared well and offered an authentic look at a culture that can be hard to find in places like Baru and Cobre. The Spanish telenovelas playing on the TV just added to the authentic experience.
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El Inka Latin Deli
3826 Sunset Street, Burnaby
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