Rooted in street food, chicken shacks, and back-alley cebicherias, Peruvian food has won praise in recent years from such cosmopolitan chefs as Ferran Adrià and Dan Barber. And the king of Peruvian restaurants in central Connecticut is CoraCora, where Hector Ludena and Luisa Jimenez take guests on a tour of their country’s vivid and robust cuisine. Housed in a former McDonald’s in West Hartford, the restaurant has a giant stuffed llama and walls covered with brightly colored rugs and tapestries. The food is colorful, too: a kaleidoscope of corn, tomatoes, purple onions, yellow and red peppers, and brilliant green herbs. Blending wildly disparate influences, this is truly diverse cuisine. For instance, Lima’s ubiquitous chifa restaurants originate from an influx of Chinese laborers in the 19th century. Those immigrants introduced arroz chaufa (from the Mandarin “chao fan,” or fried rice) and lomo saltado, a stir fry consisting of soy-marinated sirloin strips, onions, tomatoes, amarillo peppers and cilantro. That dish spawned a pasta variant, tallarin saltado, whose name is a mutation of “tagliarini.” So now we have an Italian version of a Chinese technique adapted via the Spanish to South American ingredients. Source: New York Times