Lamb Shank (seco a la norteña)

by Mort Hochstein
December 18, 2008

ANDINA
1314 NW Glisan St
Portland, OR 97209
503-228-9535

Where to dine with just one free night in Portland, a city with a reputation for good food, and recommendations pouring in from friends? I chose Peru.

Via Andina, that is, a bustling Peruvian restaurant in Portland’s Pearl district, the city’s only-slightly-less awesome answer to Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Andina, with its friendly service and plentiful seating, is a huge but welcoming barn of a place. The food offerings, all five pages of them, are as close as you can come to real Andean fare and quite possibly better than what you’d find in most restaurants in the region for which Andina is named.

The overwhelming menu of tapas — pequeno, mediano and grande — cebiches, platos de fondo criollos (traditional main courses) and platos novoandinos (contemporary adaptations), is formidable. So before we attacked, we began with a traditional pisco sour, with a generous pour of tart Peruvian brandy and a frothy topping of whipped egg white; and a basket of small rolls with a trio of dipping sauces compliments of the house. With our appetites sharpened and with Doris Rodriguez de Platt, owner and everyone’s second mother, as our guide, we ventured into novoandino dining.

Portions here are large. We started with a palta rellena de cangrejo y langostinos, a fresh avocado half stuffed with crab and shrimp, three of my favorite foods in one luscious package. It lived up to Mama Platt’s recommendation, as did pimiento piquillo relleno, Peruvian peppers generously overloaded with cheese, quinoa and Serrano ham. There were a couple dozen other tapas we would like to have tried: flaky beef-laden empanadas with raisins and olives; marinated chicken kebobs with peanut sauce; quinoa salad with cheese, avocados and olives; and all sorts of seafood platos. But we had to work on our mains.

Again, we focused on the traditional side of the menu, opting for seco a la norteña, lamb shank, which Doris told us came from an old family recipe. It was fall-off-the-bone tender lamb, cooked ever so slowly in the Northern Peruvian style, spiced with cilantro, beer, onions and garlic, topping a stew of canary beans and salsa criolla, chopped tomatoes with onion, pepper and Serrano chili. An increasingly popular dish in restaurants wherever we travel, it would be hard to match Andina’s lamb shank outside of a kitchen in the Peruvian mountains.

To accompany our meal, we chose our wine with the assistance of Sommelier Ken Collura. A New York transplant with seasoning at Bern’s, the Tampa steakhouse with the nation’s largest wine book, Collura treats a customer’s pocketbook with care, offering 25 to 30 wines under $30. Our choice, a 2004 Maquis Lien, was a gutsy but elegant blend of Syrah, Carménère, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot and Malbec. Hard to find on retail shelves, I might have to return just for that wine; it’s gotten great press.

Desserts presented more staggering options, so we went for what we perceived as familiar, but the goodies that followed were far from usual. Our flan was a creamy lemon-flavored goat cheesecake topped with basil- and habanero-spiced berries. Not my local baker’s cheesecake by any means. The second selection, the chocolate tart, equally unprecedented, was a lush, dark, chocolate and cinnamon flavored cake, accompanied by toasted corn praline and lucuma (a subtropical Andean fruit) ice cream. Oh, the decadence!

I’ll return to Andina for the wine, and I’ll also return for the pescados y mariscos_and cebiches, the seafood side of the menu, which, apart from our stuffed avocado, we unfortunately neglected. But it’s not just the food that will bring me back to Andina whenever I visit Portland. It’s the gusto of the whole house, rendering loud music unnecessary, and the willingness of servers to talk a diner through the twists and turns of a new cuisine. It’s also the fairness and huge portions as well as the good prices and tremendous values on the wine list. There are still pages of the Andina menu that I want to explore, so I’m already looking for a reason to return to Portland.

Also in Lamb, Peruvian, Portland