Past Pollo: How One Chef Is Redefining NYC’s Peruvian Cuisine

New Yorkers familiar with Peruvian cuisine have generally done business with ceviche-slingers and rotisserie joints, but Llama Inn is something else. Newly opened in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, Llama Inn presents the more modern and complicated work of a first-generation Peruvian-American.

Take the lomo saltado, which comes on a cast-iron sizzle platter—a heap of hard-seared beef laced with petals of red onion and tomato, crowned with fries, and already huge enough to feed three people. Erik Ramirez draws from this city’s fetish for large format, and from the dish’s Chinese-Peruvian roots, adding sheer chive pancakes and plenty of fixings—pickled chilies, pieces of cold avocado, a squeeze bottle of rocoto-spiked crema—so you can pile everything up to make your own tacos.