I was at a party on a New Yorkrooftop not long ago – uselessly sober amid the bustle and whirl of what might as well have been a mass attempt to break some obscure spicy margarita consumption record – when an American stranger turned to me purposefully. “So… London,” he began, having been told where I was from and what I do for a living. “It’s not really a place that’s known for its great restaurants, huh?” Friends, please know that I did not wholly take the bait. Yes, there was a momentary flash of defensiveness. A temptation, perhaps, to detail all the ways in which the land of bang average “fluke crudos” and sweet potato with marshmallow could hardly claim total superiority over the eclectic verve of the capital’s food culture.
But mostly I was just a little bit baffled by the uselessness of the implicit comparison. Chiefly, because New York and London’s restaurant landscapes have arguably never been more closely aligned. A pronounced mania for revivalist French bistros currently proliferates in both cities; the time zone-straddling likes of Hawksmoor, The NoMad and Sunday In Brooklyn are packing in practically interchangeable crowds on either side of the Atlantic. And now, here is Llama Inn: a freshly launched and utterly scintillating, Shoreditch-based spin off of Peruvian-American chef Erik Ramirez’s Brooklyn-born hit, that further cements the sense of culinary kinship between our scrappy, sprawling burgs.
Its status as a certified looker doesn’t hurt. Heading beyond the yellow door that marks its street-level presence within The Hoxton Shoreditch, I was whooshed up into a kind of breezy, Architectural Digest dreamscape – all lush greenery girding the canopied main conservatory room, the percussive rattle of shaken pisco sours behind a long bar, and late-summer sunshine hammering down onto the worn tiles and low-slung soft furnishings of an extended terrace. If it was the sort of scene to make you feel like a competition winner then that was fitting. Waiting for me, nestled among a crowd with a high quotient of glamorous alpha lunchers, were Rajan and Neena Gupta: Hertfordshire-based restaurant enthusiasts that had won a ride-along as part of a charity raffle in aid of Action Against Hunger. “He won the prize but I told him there was no way he was coming without me,” said Neena with a grin, establishing a relationship power dynamic that I very much recognised.
Our first entry to the concise, flyer-sized menu was pastel de choclo croquettes: gorgeous, golden-breaded toques of corn and spurting smoked mozzarella. Pork shoulder sliders, thin sheafs of pig rigged with spicy mayo and an electrically bright onion salsa, were really more like indecently delicious, steroidal bacon rolls. And then, there was the table-silencing spectacle of scallop ceviche: a visually trippy, Nikkei-inspired frieze of dragonfruit, nori crackers, spoonably delicate shellfish and condensed milk-thickened marinating liquor that looked like the work of Cruella de Vil’s traumatised personal chef but played an extended oceanic symphony across our palates.
This is not the first time the fresh, puckering vigour of Peruvian cuisine has been successfully modernised. But there is something in Ramirez’s abundant skill, freewheeling attitude and phone-eats-first visual sense – evident in a broodingly dark, succulent expanse of honey and miso glazed pork chop – that gives the faintly familiar collisions thrilling new context.
Heading beyond the yellow door, I was whooshed up into a kind of breezy, Architectural Digest dreamscape
Yes, lomo saltado, a chip-strewn, high-grade riff on the classic beef and potato stir fry, felt, as Neena noted, a little overwhelming both in terms of its size and intense, teriyaki-ish sauce. But solace could be found in the sparkling panorama across the city (there are plans to explore covering the terrace), in the playful drinks list (top marks to the punning, sangria-influenced Llama Del Rey) and in the early stand-out pudding: a judiciously sweetened carob, sticky fig and hazelnut sprinkled ice cream sandwich in a squidgy, chai-spiced bun. It is proof that arguments about the competing merits of American and British food cultures might be wide of the mark. On this evidence, at least, it is the Peruvians that do it best.
