Beef Heart, Pisco and Peru on Seventh Avenue

By Andrew Edling | Reviews | The Maricopa Meridian

Nicole told me to go to El Chullo.

Nicole is Peruvian. That gave the recommendation more weight than anything Google could have told me.

So on Saturday afternoon I drove down Seventh Avenue to El Chullo Peruvian Restaurant & Bar to see what she knew that I didn’t.

The first thing you see is Peru.

A large red-and-white Peruvian flag hangs outside beside a mural. Walk through the door and the country follows you inside. Llamas sit on shelves. Bright woven hats hang from mannequin heads. Souvenirs marked Recuerdo de Huancayo, Perú decorate the walls. Peruvian mugs sit beside jars and textiles. A freezer labeled PERUVIAN ESSENTIALS sells ingredients including ají amarillo, yellow potatoes and lúcuma pulp.

This is not a restaurant that put three photographs of Machu Picchu on the wall and called itself authentic.

El Chullo does not merely serve Peru.

It stocks it, decorates with it, advertises it and gives it wall space.

There were community notices at the entrance, flyers in Spanish and advertisements for Latin events around Phoenix. Families filled tables throughout the dining room.

Then I looked toward the televisions.

LSU and Ole Miss were playing football.

That seemed about right for Phoenix.

Peru on the walls. SEC football on the big screen. And Sam Leavitt, the former Arizona State quarterback now playing for LSU, was having his difficulties against Ole Miss while I was confronting a different kind of problem at my table. Leavitt transferred to LSU after Arizona State, giving the game an unexpected local connection from several hundred miles away. 

My problem involved a cow.

More specifically, its heart.

I had looked at the menu earlier and seen anticuchos: grilled beef heart marinated in Peruvian spices and served with potatoes, corn, chimichurri and rocoto sauce.

Absolutely not.

I am willing to try new food. There are limits.

My waiter was Omar.

Omar was friendly, patient and evidently unwilling to let me leave without testing those limits.

He encouraged me to try the anticuchos.

I told him I wasn’t sure.

He made me an offer.

If I didn’t like them, he said, he would take them back and not charge me.

That changed the math.

Before the heart arrived, I started with the traditional pisco sour.

The drink came in a stemmed glass beneath a thick white cap of egg-white foam, marked with bitters and finished with a dried citrus wheel. The menu lists Pisco Caravedo Torontel, fresh lime juice, simple syrup and egg white.

It looked elegant.

Then I drank it.

The lime gave the drink brightness. The foam softened everything. The pisco sat underneath it all, strong enough to announce itself without overwhelming the drink.

I was glad I ordered it.

There are drinks that accompany a meal and drinks that explain where you are.

This one did the latter.

Then Omar brought the heart.

Three skewers of dark, glazed meat arrived over potatoes and enormous kernels of Peruvian corn, with sauces on the side.

I looked at it.

It looked back at me.

I had already decided I was not eating beef heart.

Then the beef heart arrived.

So I ate it.

Then another piece.

Then another.

The psychological barrier disappeared almost immediately. It did not taste like liver. There was no great organ-meat horror waiting for me on the skewer. It was beefy, smoky, deeply seasoned and firmer than an ordinary steak.

Omar never had to take the plate back.

I ate the whole thing.

Omar won.

I was charged.

Fair enough.

Then came the lomo saltado, with a fried egg added on top.

This was the best thing I ate.

The plate arrived loaded with beef, thick red onions and tomatoes, French fries, white rice and a dark savory sauce. A sunny-side egg sat across the center.

At first glance, lomo saltado looks like several different dinners collided.

Steak.

Rice.

French fries.

Vegetables.

Egg.

Soy-based sauce.

It should not necessarily make sense.

It does.

The beef and onions carried the sauce. The fries soaked up what escaped. The rice gave everything somewhere to land. Breaking the yolk over the meat and potatoes made an already excessive plate even better.

There was nothing delicate about it.

Good.

I loved every bit of it.

By then the pisco sour was disappearing, LSU and Ole Miss were still going at it on the television and the earlier anxiety about eating the heart of a cow seemed ridiculous.

I had come because a Peruvian woman told me to.

That may still be the best restaurant-selection algorithm available.

What makes El Chullo interesting, though, is that the food is only part of the experience.

The restaurant feels less like a themed dining room than a little piece of Peru operating in Phoenix.

The identity is everywhere.

It is in the pisco.

It is in the food.

It is in the hats and llamas.

It is in the Huancayo souvenirs.

It is in the freezer full of Peruvian ingredients.

It is in the flyers on the door.

And because this is Phoenix, it is also a place where you can sit beneath all of that and watch college football.

Cities are built from combinations that make no sense until somebody lives inside them long enough that they do.

That afternoon on Seventh Avenue, I drank Peruvian brandy, ate grilled beef heart for the first time, watched a former Sun Devil quarterback playing in the SEC and discovered that my waiter had been right about nearly everything.

The only thing I regretted was running out of room.

The dessert menu included picarones, alfajores, caramel flan, lúcuma ice cream and passion-fruit cheesecake.

I wanted one.

I couldn’t do it.

If I had had room, I would have kept eating.

The bill came to $92.53, including tax and tip: a traditional pisco sour, anticuchos, lomo saltado with a fried egg and lemonade.

Then the receipt delivered one final piece of information.

This purchase earned 1 Llama.

That may be the finest loyalty-program language I have ever encountered.

I left El Chullo $92.53 poorer, one llama richer and forced to admit that a plate of beef heart I had absolutely refused to eat had somehow disappeared.

Nicole was right.

Omar was right.

Sometimes you should listen to the Peruvian woman.

And sometimes you should listen to your waiter.