Costa Verde

PERU 🇵🇪

La Costa Verde in Perú is a fairly small stretch of coast in Lima, where green waters, strong winds, and intense natural beauty make for one of the nicest stretches of urban beachfront on Earth. It's a fairly lofty name for such a workaday Peruvian eatery, but the food flies high enough on its own.

Before your meal, a nice salty tray of roasted hominy is brought out to tease your taste buds. During lunch, you will be joined by area locals who come in, order a lunch special, and quickly return to their jobs. The special ($7, not pictured) comes with choice of entree and a nice cilantro soup. One interesting option is the chaufa, a dish so similar to Chinese takeout fried rice and found in chifas in Peru, but most of the others around you will be eating chicken.

The restaurant does Peruvian specialties very well. That very rotisserie chicken is spot on, and the anticuchos ($7.25, not pictured) are good substitutes when you are not in Lima, despite the unfortunate fact that they carry no picarones here.

Walking down the street in any central coast city in Perú will present many hand-written menus with aji de gallina written at or near the top. The dish is a staple and an ultimate comfort food. It translates directly to chili chicken, but spices are mild in Peruvian cooking, the yellow aji covering thin chicken slices and potatoes. The dish served here ($9.25, below) is served with white rice and half a boiled egg.

On a most recent visit, we decided to live on the edge and skip the normal ceviches for picante de mariscos ($14.50, below), a hot seafood dish that is medium spicy. The sauce is nice but it did not quite give us the same love as the delicious cold ceviche that can be eaten here.

I do not remember eating a tamal ($5.50, below) while traveling in Perú, so I was interested to try one here, but unfortunately they are far less tasty than their Mexican rivals. Too much corn taste and too dry, but there is an olive inside.

What I did have a lot of on that visit was chicha morada (below), a slightly sweet drink made of purple corn and very delicious, despite what my friends thought. At the very least, it is worth a taste for everyone.

The service here at Costa Verde is very sweet, despite its functional nature. A couple scenes of the Andes Mountains decorate the interior, but not much more. I left with a feeling of wanting more immediately. It is impossible for one person or a small group to sample all the necessary items on the menu, so visit multiple times or bring a lot of friends.

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ELMHURST Queens
94-59 Corona Avenue

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