Peru by way of China at El Rocoto

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES

El Rocoto hits every equatorial trope: The walls glow a golden yellow, packs of tropical fish zip through a cool blue aquarium, the menus even come with a South American street scene sunken into their leather. And inside those bound books are all the Peruvian staples, a long list of cebiches puckered by the tart taste of lime, anticuchos stabbed through by wooden skewers and the stir-fried standard lomo saltado.

But read deeper and you turn up dishes that bridge a bicontinental divide. It takes a second look, but they’re there—things like wonton soup, fried rice and chow mein, dishes all culled from a Chinese tradition that’s more than a world away from the restaurant’s purely Peruvian interior.

Like the Japanese-Peruvian cuisine at Lomita’s Kotosh, El Rocoto’s dishes pull from Peru’s immigrant past, drawing on the recipes and techniques that traveled with the Chan family from China to Peru and, later, to the kitchen of the first El Rocoto in Gardena. Disparate as the two cuisines can be, El Rocoto’s dishes all somehow share a common language, one that’s perfectly in-tune to the tongues of more than just the Chan family.

Still, the restaurant starts as familiar as any Peruvian place: with a basket of bread and a duo of aji sauces. That’s just to hold you over—the cebiches make a more appropriate start. The cebiche mixto (a citric mix of halibut, shrimp, octopus and squid) is the most balanced, served under the shredded remains of what seems like an entire onion and accompanied by hunks of sweet potato and yucca and a cup of toasted corn kernels. Those are all standards of proper cebiches. But what elevates El Rocoto’s acidic appetizer is quality. With lesser cebiches, the semi-cooked seafood can be a chore, requiring powerful molars to grind through the dish. Squid, for example, often turns into tough white rings that chew like loose rubber bands. But here the squid is actually the best of all the seafood—each piece goes down with sashimi-like ease.

For a fuller meal from the sea, there’s jalea, a fish fry fit for two in the same vein as bouillabaisse and paella. El Rocoto’s jalea starts with a fried filet and builds from there, stacking up shrimp, squid, scallops, mussels, salsa criolla, potatoes, yucca and more of that toasted Peruvian corn. Like its European relatives, jalea is a completely consuming dish, one that seems to simply wipe away time as you spend the whole meal prying open shells and slurping back just about every sea creature on the menu.

A more delicate choice comes in the form of pescado sudado. The dish is a simple one (a couple poached filets hidden under another pile of onions and drenched in a white wine-based sauce), but it’s still a standout. And that’s because of the fish, so tenderly poached that it’s a wonder the filets don’t break apart under the weight of the onions.

As meat-based meals go, the aforementioned lomo saltado is a standard-bearer at every Peruvian restaurant, so for a more interesting entrée pick the seco de cordero. It’s tough to tell what’s on the plate at first (the whole helping of lamb is blanketed by a cilantro sauce so verdantly green that the little mounds of meat almost look like rocks engulfed in moss), but send your fork into one of the pieces of lamb and it falls away, a lean meat more than fit to follow any of the restaurant’s seafood.

From the Chinese end of El Rocoto’s menu come dishes like pollo enrollado, which rolls up a piece of boneless chicken with shrimp, asparagus and oyster sauce. And pleasantly worthwhile are El Rocoto’s various chaufas, fried rice dishes sharpened by spears of pickled daikon.

With desserts, the restaurant returns to its original tropical tone. And that’s best accomplished with a few scoops of lúcuma ice cream, a flavor churned out of the popular lúcuma fruit. The ice cream is lit up to a bright pumpkin color and has the faintest caramel taste. It’s always the littlest touches that stick out, though, and here it’s a tiny umbrella planted in the ice cream—a paper parasol fighting for shade amongst El Rocoto’s perpetually sunny disposition.

EL ROCOTO 11433 SOUTH ST | CERRITOS 90703 | 562.924.1919 | ELROCOTO.COM | OPEN MON-THURS 11AM-9:30PM | FRI-SAT 11AM-11PM | SUN 9:30AM-9:30PM | FOOD FOR TWO $25-40 | BEER, WINE

Tags: cerritos, chinese, el rocoto, Food, peruvian