Double Handshake

I recently interviewed Peruvian chef and restaurateur Eduardo Vargas for an upcoming story in China Economic Review magazine about food at this year’s Shanghai Expo. Vargas has lived in Shanghai since 2002 and launched a number of restaurants around the city with lots more planned.  One of Vargas’ upcoming projects is that he will run the Peruvian Kitchen restaurant at Peru’s pavilion for the Shanghai Expo. I only used a few brief quotes from Vargas for the story, but the full Q&A transcript is fairly interesting.

Q: What do you have planned for the Peruvian pavilion?
A: The restaurant will be a representation of the culinary traditions in Peru now. Peru is now the most trendy, most fashionable food in Latin America at the present moment. What the Spanish are in Europe, the Peruvians now are in Latin America. In Spain, you have many famous chefs doing modern cuisine, and there is a similar situation in Peru in Latin America. All the winners of best restaurants of the year in Latin America for the last three or four years have been Peruvian restaurants. Peru has very rich influences from Africa, from China, from Japan, from Europe, from the Andes. The result is very interesting food. We have a huge coast, so we have a lot of seafood. So, a lot of food is based on that. So, the food we’re going to serve at the Expo is a combination of that. We’re starting with our national dish, ceviche.

Q: Are you planning on serving all the classic Peruvian dishes like ceviche, causa, lomo saltado, anticuchos?
A: Yes and no. We will use Peruvian ingredients, Peruvian flavors and Peruvian techniques, but served in a contemporary way. So, we will use rojoto or ajia marillo like before, but maybe we will make a foam from it. We will do a causa, but will add a contemporary twist on it. We will present it as it would be in a contemporary restaurant in Peru. In a trendy restaurant in Peru, you don’t eat what mama and papa cooked 20 years ago. I’m bringing over five young star chefs from Lima to Shanghai in the next two weeks, all Cordon Bleu-trained and who have been working with the best chefs in Peru. I went to Peru to handpick them. My good friend (well-known chef and restaurateur) Gaston Acurio introduced me to two young chefs from his restaurant Astrid & Gaston. (This is possible because) in Peru, chefs are very united, and we have a common goal, to promote Peruvian cuisine, to make it as well-known as Mexican food around the world. We believe our food is better than Mexican, but unfortunately Mexican food is more wide-spread, everybody knows it. The only way to do that is to help each other to promote where ever we can, and the Expo is a perfect opportunity.

I had a chance to bring these young chefs over to China and work for me for a couple years. They will live in China, and we will eventually have five-star chefs from Peru working in Shanghai for awhile.

Q: So, the five chefs will come for the Expo and stay in China afterward?
A: Yes, they’ll stay for a couple years. I want to use them as much as I can.

Q: Are you making changes to the menu to adapt to Chinese tastes or the market?
A: No, not really. At the Expo, I believe each countries’ restaurants want to demonstrate what happens and how food is from their home. Therefore, our food will be authentic. We have many dishes in Peru that are influenced from Chinese dishes in the past. Lomo Saltado is basically a stir fry of beef that Chinese brought with them to Peru 100 years ago and then added some Peruvian ingredients. Now it’s a classic Peruvian dish. Another dish is a sort of stir fried rice using Peruvian chilies with it and a lot of seafood. We’re going to make this fried rice Peruvian style. I know it’s going to be acceptable to the local market.

Q: Are you sourcing ingredients from China or importing from Peru?
A: The main ingredients are coming from China. We’re importing about 3,000 kilos of chiles, the corn, the potatoes and some other important ingredients. The meat and the vegetables are all coming from China.

Q: Are the logistics difficult? Have you had issues with poor quality on the China side?
A: I’m doing my own importing. I flew to Peru, found the suppliers and bought them and now it’s in the boat. I already have a few restaurants in China and already work with suppliers, so it’s all right. Today, the situation is much better than a few years ago. Now, the standards of products in China are now at a standard level.

Q: Is setting up a temporary restaurant much different than setting up a permanent restaurant?
A: If I hadn’t previously opened restaurants in Shanghai, then I would have big troubles. But now, I have everything. I already know how to set up places. I don’t have problems because I already have years doing this in China, but I believe I believe a lot of restauranteurs coming to China for the first time are having a hard time. I’ve been receieving phone calls from the other pavilions asking me to take over their pavilion restaurants. But I won’t do it because there are too many regulations for the Expo. So, we’ll do the Peruvian pavilion and that’s it.

Image: Shmag.cn

If he’s working, you can’t miss seeing Francisco Choy on the main street of Lima’s Chinatown. If you don’t see his red booth with “Horoscopo Chino” painted in black letters, you’ll at least have to skirt around the dozen or so people crowding around it, straining to hear his words. Francisco has been telling fortunes, advising on spiritual matters and selling Chinese spiritual goods in Lima for the last thirteen years.

Born in Peru of a father from Guangdong and a second-generation Chinese-Peruvian mother, Francisco himself is likely in his forties, with long shoulder-length hair and balding on top. When I saw him last week, he was wearing a white button-down tucked into jeans and a pair of magnetic bracelets – like the ones he sells for ten and fifteen soles a piece – on both wrists.

There were other Chinese spiritual goods and knickknacks on sale: gold Buddha sculptures, felt posters with calligraphy, ginger in plastic bags, fake jade, dolphin wind chimes made out of blue glass. Incense smoke blew across the fifteen people crowding around the booth, making this section of Calle Capon smell like the inside of a Chinese temple.

Francisco would press his thumb into the customer’s palm and immediately began speaking – “There is a big financial opportunity coming for you,” or “Be on the lookout for love.” He’d speak for a minute or two, quickly. He had a silver engraved bowl that he would strike with a stick when the reading was finished, making circles around the readee’s face with it. Then, he’d ring a bell, holding his palm out in front of him, eyes shut. Both he and the customer would open their eyes and he’d dispense change for the transaction. Three soles (US$1) for your future told.

When I checked back with the booth three hours later, the group had swollen to thirty. Business was good.

The video above, care of the Lima newspaper El Comercio, is a little more than a year old. In it, Francisco introduces himself and talks about the then-upcoming Chinese New Year (Year of the Rat). It is now, of course, a “niu year,” but Francisco and his business haven’t  changed too much in the meantime. Enjoy!

I first met Roxana a month ago, on a stuffy Saturday afternoon at the Beijing Centro Cultural in Lima’s Lince district. Roxana stood out in the crowd of mostly teenagers and college students who were listening to two Peruvian students talk about their semester at Peking University. She and I got to talking – her Mandarin colored with a strong southern accent – and after an hour or more of listening to her stories, I joked that she had better get started writing her memoirs. She smiled and shook her head.

“If you don’t, then I’ll have to do it, but in English. In fact, I’ll invite you out for dinner and you can tell me your life story,” I said.

“It will take a lot longer than one day,” she replied.

Though Roxana was born in China’s southern Guangdong province, she traces her connection with Peru to her paternal grandfather. He moved to Lima as a young man, worked for a few years in a small shop in Chinatown and returned to China to raise his children there. “He wasn’t going to stay in Peru; he wanted them to have a Chinese education, speak Chinese.”

Roxana’s father had similar ideas, and family’s members didn’t stray far from home. In her late twenties, during the Cultural Revolution, Roxana worked as a middle school math teacher at the same school she had attended as a student fifteen years earlier. She found the work mindless, but there was nothing to be done about it. With China’s Reform and Opening policies taking hold in the late 1970s, Roxana, still unmarried in her 30s, started thinking about her grandfather and his time in Peru. In November 1981, she flew into Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport with her younger sister.

Roxana didn’t speak any Spanish, but through the city’s Chinatown network, she found work as a receptionist. And then, with a bit of the language under her belt, she got work at a Chinese newspaper office. Within three years, her Spanish language ability was good enough for her to help translate and edit a book written about Qi Gong, written by a martial arts instructor named Alex Li Chang, also from Guangdong, who had come to South America to teach and popularize Chinese martial arts. The book project went well: the book was published, and the two married in 1984.

Roxana and Alex had a son, and the couple had ten good years together. Alex often traveled around South America for martial arts competitions and demonstrations; Roxana, like her grandfather, found work a small shop in Chinatown and watched after their son. “I’m very lucky when it comes to business and work, but very unlucky when it comes to love.”

In 1994, while he was in Argentina, Alex went to the hospital with cerebral hemorrhaging, likely the culmination of years of head injuries. Roxana flew to Buenos Aires and found the situation was not as grave as she’d imagined. Alex flew back to Guangzhou for treatment and called her in Peru, telling her that he could barely recognize the city he’d left years ago. Roxana’s husband died in 1997.

She shows me his picture from the inside jacket of La Energia Vital y La Fuerza Interna – the book that brought them together. He’s thin with a flat-top, in a white gi, standing battle-ready. She slips the book back in its plastic sleeve and we both make intimations to leave the restaurant. She brightens and tells me that she’s started teaching Chinese to some Peruvian students on top of her six-day-a-week job at the shop. She’s tired after her twelve-hour shifts, of course, but she enjoys it. “It’s always good to be busy,” she says.

I nod and smile, thinking of the dozens of questions and clarifications I still have for her, but which we don’t have the time for now. We shake hands and walk outside. I head left, she right.