El Inca
2485 Murfreesboro Rd. 367-9200
Open daily 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
Attention, Music City global diners! Thanks to Victor Rossi, owner of El Inca restaurant, you may now color in the country of Peru on your dining guide to Nashville.
This is excellent news for anyone who is culinarily curious, but it’s especially welcome to Carmen Salazar, a native of Lima, Peru. Mrs. Salazar moved to Nashville in 1997, after 20 years in Florida. Though Florida is only several hundred miles closer to Peru than Nashville, it has a sizable population of South American immigrants, and it was not difficult to find a taste of her native home there. But Nashville was a different story—at least until the opening of El Inca three months ago.
“My sister-in-law’s friend is a friend of the owner,” she says, “and she told us about the new Peruvian restaurant. My husband and I were so happy. We have been three times already. The menu has so much variety, the common dishes cooked at home in Peru and the very popular dishes. We never know what to order because we want to eat everything.”
Salazar is describing “choice paralysis,” a condition that strikes diners faced with so many tempting options, they find themselves unable to narrow down to one or two. On the other hand, most Nashvillians who visit El Inca will need to guard against “menu-idiosys.” This occurs when diners, unfamiliar with a particular cuisine, anxiously scan the menu, realize they haven’t got the foggiest idea what anything is, and say, “I’ll have what they’re having,” pointing to the table of four over the waiter’s left shoulder.
You may want to reconsider this strategy, lest you are gesturing toward a table of Peruvians enjoying one of the country’s most popular dishes: cau cau, or stewed tripe. Rossi is quite fond of cau cau, though he warns it is not for everyone. Salazar, on the other hand, is a fan of patita con mani, beef hooves with peanut sauce. She also admits that it may not be a taste Americans will acquire.
But fear not, at No. 52 on the menu, patiti con mani is the last entry, leaving 50 other far more conventional items to choose from—all prepared Peruvian style. And that’s not even including El Inca’s specialty: pollos a la brasa, or wood-rotisserie chicken.
Thanks to the tremendous growth of the Latino population in Middle Tennessee, tacos and burritos are nearly as common here as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Krystal burgers. But the food of Peru differs markedly from the food of Mexico, and there is nary a nacho to be found at El Inca.
What you will find is that nearly every dish is served with a starch, sometimes two or even three. The bistek a lo pobre, for instance, is fried steak with rice, French fries, plantain and egg. The western border of Peru is on the Pacific Ocean, thus there is a lot of seafood and shellfish in the country’s cuisine. The eastern border lies next to Brazil, so there is plenty of beef as well. Meanwhile, the northern end of Peru cozies up to Colombia, and the cuisines of the two countries are similar. Rossi says while the Peruvian population in Nashville is not very large, he has noticed plenty of Colombian customers in his restaurant.
Did I mention potatoes? According to Near a Thousand Tables, A History of Food, more than 150 cultivated varieties of potatoes were known in the Andes by the time of the Spanish Invasion, and 30,000 tons of the tuber were produced annually at the high-Andean imperial city of Tiahuanaco before its collapse 1,000 years ago. Though potatoes make frequent appearances on the plates coming from the kitchen of El Inca, they seem limited to the common white potato.
As for seasonings, several special dishes are cooked in a basil sauce. Cilantro is a favored herb, chopped fresh and scattered over different dishes; it also serves as the flavoring and the coloring in a squeeze bottle of pale green sauce that sits on every table and tastes particularly good with the rotisserie chicken.
Though potatoes are typically a side item, it forms the basis of two of the appetizers: papa a la huancaina, slices of cold boiled potato served with lettuce and a mild white cheese, and the papa rellena, whole cooked potatoes tunneled through with ground beef. But among the appetizers, it was the plate of choros a la chalaca that quickly made its way around our table, leaving a circle of smiling customers. The cold steamed mussels came delivered on the half-shell, each covered with a fine dice of onion, tomato, cilantro and a squeeze of lemon juice.
It must be illegal to go to a Peruvian restaurant and not get at least one ceviche, the combination of fresh fish and shellfish “cooked” in lime or lemon juice with minced onion and peppers. With four on the menu at El Inca, you may find yourself suffering the Salazars’ dilemma: Which ceviche to order? While I typically believe that less is more, when it comes to ceviche, too much is never enough, so I would go for the ceviche mixto, which has it all: fresh fish, clams, scallops, squid and octopus. At Mexican and other restaurants, ceviche is usually ordered as a starter; here, it’s a light entrée, with a generous portion mounded on a dinner plate and supplemented with shredded lettuce, corn and potatoes.
The seafood soups are another standout at El Inca: big white bowls filled with a savory broth chock-full of fish pieces, octopus, squid, shrimp, crab legs and mussels in the shell. The sopa salvaje also contains noodles, while parihuela does not.
After the obvious selection of the ceviche and seafood soups, our party of seven stumbled rather blindly through the rest of the entrées, divided into categories of fish, beef, chicken and specials. We suffered not a single disappointment, leading me to conclude that even the most uncertain American diner cannot go wrong at El Inca. From our experience, limited as it was, our highest recommendations are the pescado a lo macho, a crisply fried fish filet covered in a sauté of shrimp, squid and octopus; the seco con frijoles, a stew-like dish of tender beef chunks cooked in a piquant cilantro sauce and ladled over rice, with refried beans and boiled yucca root on the side; and the fantastic bistek encebollado, seasoned steak cooked on the flat grill with onion, tomatoes and cilantro, then served over rice.
According to Salazar, speaking to me by phone from her office at Waller, Lansden, Dortch & Davis, we did very well for amateurs. Had we been fortunate enough to receive her guidance, she would have insisted we try two of Peru’s most popular dishes: lomo saltado, another beef dish with tomato and onion; and aji de gallina, shredded chicken cooked in a peanut sauce and served with rice.
The homemade desserts include flan, brightly-colored gelatins, rice pudding and alfajores, a construction of two shortbread-like cookies spread with caramel. Domestic and Peruvian beers come by the bottle; Inca Kola is a yellow-colored soft drink that smells and tastes like bubble gum.
El Inca is a family affair, employing Rossi’s sisters and mother in the kitchen, his nieces on the floor and at the register, and his father wherever his skills are needed. It’s a long haul out to this part of Murfreesboro Road, but it is undoubtedly worth the trip. To find El Inca, head southeast, past Nashboro Center, past Pinnacle Point, past the Dollar General center and the Publix grocery store; turn into Edge-O-Lake, centered by a Big K-Mart. There, smack in the middle of suburban America, is Peru, outstandingly presented by El Inca.
