William Sitwell reviews Llama Inn, London: ‘The best thing to come out of Peru since Paddington’
My pal Adam got the wrong animal. If he was playing a game of word association and he’d yelled out ‘alpaca’, then someone else might have replied, ‘llama’, and the game would have been won. As it was, Adam was wandering around The Alpaca, on Essex Road in Islington, looking both for me and any Peruvian vibes and coming up short.
So thank goodness for mobiles as he was soon en route to Llama Inn, in Shoreditch, just a couple of miles away. (A different fate awaited a young Fleet Street journalist in the 1980s who, legend records, was told to take the views on capital punishment of the regulars at the bar of the Wig and Pen, an old drinking hole of hacks and lawyers on the Strand. Some hours later, the hapless scribbler called the news desk: ‘I’m in Wigan. Where’s The Pen?’)
By the time Adam fetched up, I was happily ensconced in the restaurant, which occupies the seventh floor at the back of the Hoxton Hotel. It’s a covered terrace and, on the day that I visited, a beautifully bright, light and airy room.
Beneath the black steel girders of the skylights it’s all plain woods – bars and tables – and seat coverings of browny orange. This is the sister restaurant to Erik Ramirez’s cult Llama Inn of New York, which is the sort of info that you can mention to people at drinks parties and they will think that you’re both in the know AND part of the jet-set.
The other thing you can mug up on – especially if you’re waiting for an Adam – is Peruvian terminology, since Llama Inn kindly hands out a glossary along with the menu. So you can figure out your cancha (Andean corn kernels toasted in a pan with oil) from your chancaca (a sweet sauce made from sugarcane). Although after a glass of wonderfully dry and lively Spanish verdejo (Abadía de Aribayo), my brain locked on to the printed news that this wine was ‘on tap’ and I quickly realised that my interest in Peruvian culinary terms was fugacious.
I started with some skewers: of cabbage and octopus. Each was neat and pretty – street food made posh – the cabbage scattered with toasted quinoa with a mild Japanese miso and that chancaca sauce. A wild mix of sauces, perhaps, but a triumphant one. Maintaining some crunch still, and caressed with that nutty seasoning, I never thought eating cabbage could prove to be this fun.
There was similar successful saucey creativity going on with the octopus (with capers and aji panca; a pepper, don’t you know, that is sweet and berry-like and smoky).
Then came a ceviche course. An idea I’ve never really taken to, the dish being halfway between sashimi and cold fish soup. The citrus in the ceviche (usually lime, with some seasoning) is supposed to cure the fish and I suppose might offer spiced freshness under the blazing noon sun of South America, but I’ve always felt conned, wanting to take the fish out of the liquid. Until now.
The scallops were in a liquid of condensed milk with ‘leche de tigre’, a spicy limey marinade. On top were scattered light seaweedy crisps. It was sensational; melting scallops, that milky soup, a rising chilli heat and the crunch of the crisps. If this is true ceviche I’m a convert. And it surpassed another (still excellent) dish of crisp squid and potato-like yuca (cassava).
Llama Inn, with its breezy, well-versed service and professional intent, is the best thing to come out of Peru since Paddington.
