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.

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.