Although Lima, the capital of Peru, has roughly the same population as New York City, it has 6,000 Chinese restaurants, more than double the number in the Big Apple. These establishments are known as chifas, taking their name from the cuisine that they serve. Wherever you go in Peru, from the Pacific Coast to the Andean peaks to the Amazon jungle, you can find chifas.

Many of the first Chinese who arrived in North America during the mid-19th century Gold Rush era were indentured workers from Canton. Over time, they established Chinatowns in cities along the Pacific Coast—from Vancouver down to San Diego—but some chose to migrate east to Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Montreal. Large Chinese communities also formed in the Barrios Chinos of Latin American capitals such as Mexico City and Havana, as well as my birthplace of Lima. Today, 15% of nine million Limeños can claim Chinese ancestry.

A tourist visiting Lima’s Chinatown might imagine its chifas to be simply Cantonese restaurants, similar to those in other Chinatowns. But chifa is actually a combination of Chinese and Peruvian food cultures that naturally evolved over the span of more than a century. The cuisine is based on ingredients such as ginger, soy sauce, and scallions; the techniques involve stir-frying in woks or steaming in bamboo baskets. But instead of strictly replicating dishes from their home country, Lima’s first- and second-generation Chinese families began incorporating native Peruvian ingredients into their cooking. Nowadays, a third of the city’s population eats chifa dishes every day.

For many Peruvian families, chifa is comfort food, and chifa restaurants are synonymous with family reunions and celebrations. Everywhere I’ve lived—from Peru and the Dominican Republic, to Canada and the United States—chifa has connected me to home.

*Sopa wantan* has been a mainstay of chifa cuisine for generations. *photo and food by Nico Vera*

Chifa Cooking Class

At an early age, I learned to cook Peru’s traditional dishes, including some chifa dishes, from my mother. So it surprised no one in my family that I became a chef. For a few years, when I lived in San Francisco, I even worked at a community cooking school, developing menus and recipes for hands-on classes which represented Peru’s diverse culinary heritage of Andean, Spanish, African, Chinese, and Japanese cultures. Every menu had a special story, but of all my classes, I found the most comfort in cooking the chifa dishes that I grew up with.

There are so many unique chifa dishes I could have introduced my students to. For example, pollo ti pa kay, in which chicken breast slices—dipped in egg whites and coated with chuño flour from ground Andean dehydrated potato—are fried and then smothered with a sweet-and-sour sauce made from ginger, five-spice powder, and tamarind. Or chi jau cuy, crispy skin-on fried Andean guinea pig bathed in oyster sauce with ají limo, the hot pepper typically used for ceviche. There’s also the aeropuerto combo plate of stir-fried noodles served alongside arroz chaufa with Andean corn kernels and chicharrón, the fried pork that is the star in the traditional breakfast sánguche (sandwich) with fried sweet potato and pickled onions. And some chifas serve a cocktail of pisco (Peru’s grape brandy) blended with lychee, milk, sugar, ice, and cinnamon.

However, my students were home cooks and I had to limit myself to easily accessible ingredients. For the last chifa class I taught there, I decided to celebrate Chinese New Year with four dishes that featured an array of ingredients and techniques:

sopa wantan (wonton soup)
arroz chaufa (fried rice)
tallarines saltados (stir-fried noodles)
pescado al vapor (steamed fish)

During the class, I gathered the students around my workstation to review the menu and discuss the ingredients we would be cooking with. I also demonstrated fundamental knife skills such as slicing ginger into julienne matchsticks. To give the class a sense of how strong Chinese food culture is in Peru, I held up a piece of the ginger and asked, “Does anyone know what we call this in Peru?”

An eager student exclaimed, “Gengibre!”

I paused and smiled. “In Peru, we don’t call ginger by its Spanish name—gengibre—like the rest of the Latinx countries,” I explained. “From restaurants to markets to homes, everyone in Peru calls it kion, which is the phonetic sound of the Cantonese word for ginger.”

“As a young beat cop, my grandfather patrolled Barrio Chino, where he first got the taste for sopa wantan”

I had the students work in small groups to prepare the fried rice, stir-fried noodles, and steamed fish, but we prepared the wonton soup communally. I showed them how to carefully fill and fold square wonton wrappers with a savory mix of ground pork, ginger, soy sauce, scallions, and sesame oil; the dumplings were then cooked in a large pot of boiling water and fished out with a spider spatula. In a separate pot, we prepared a chicken and ginger stock with chopped bok choy. And to serve the soup, we combined the wontons and stock in bowls topped with scallion rounds and a splash of sesame oil.

For the tallarines saltados, instead of using Cantonese egg noodles, we cooked Italian spaghetti—which is how my mother prepared the dish. The spaghetti was sautéed with shrimp, red onion wedges, red bell pepper squares, scallion rounds, and snow peas in a skillet with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, and vinegar.

Arroz chaufa called for a similar stir-fried preparation but with other ingredients and different textures: chopped egg omelette, crunchy toasted slivered almonds, sautéed ginger, and fried bits of poached pulled chicken mixed with rice, soy sauce, scallion rounds, and indigenous-to-South-America sweet pineapple chunks that we topped with cilantro.

The steamed fish preparation was simpler, more gentle. We poached whole white fish in large paella pans with chicken stock and a base of ají amarillo, Peru’s yellow hot pepper. To serve, we drizzled the fish with a mixture of soy sauce, ginger, and sesame oil, and then covered the fish with long strips of green onion and cilantro sprigs.

The class culminated in a family-style dinner served at a large communal table. I sat at the head of the table, answered questions, and told stories about how my mother always reminded me that “Ginger gives a dish its flavor!” and how I had traveled to Hong Kong in search of chifa’s origins. Through the cooking school’s large picture window, I observed evening revelers stopping to look inside at our celebration, and for a moment I imagined we were all at a chifa restaurant in the heart of Lima’s 150-year-old Chinatown.

The author’s family, pictured here in 1988 at a Lima chifa, complete with Inca Kola, a popular Peruvian soda that often accompanies chifa meals. *photo from Vera family archives*

Barrio Chino

My parents grew up in the working-class Barrios Altos neighborhood near Lima’s Chinatown, or Barrio Chino. My mother tells me that during the 1940s, her father was a beat cop in Barrio Chino. “Some chifas offered your grandfather sopa wantan to keep warm during cold winter nights. The chifa owner would shout ‘Sopa wantan for the guard!’ when they saw my father approach,” she explained. No doubt that’s why wonton soup became my grandfather’s favorite dish.

But there was also a dark side to Barrio Chino. Looking through my grandfather’s journal, in which my grandfather wrote about his life as a cop, I was fascinated to learn that he once busted an opium den. “During one of my rounds in Barrio Chino,” he wrote, “I noticed well-dressed businessmen, some with a chauffeur, entering a two-story building.” Curious, he followed them and discovered a room filled with men, some lying on beds, others on the floor, all smoking opium. “So I called for backup, and took them all in,” he proudly remarked, hoping for a raise or promotion.

But his superior, a police captain, told my grandfather that the men he had arrested were “protected,” and they were all let free in exchange for gifts and benefits. This was probably the first time my grandfather experienced Peru’s corruption firsthand.

The streets, callejones (narrow alleys), and tenement courtyards near the city’s central market were where Limeños first discovered this Chinese-Peruvian fusion cuisine—being served at food stalls that were creole versions of Hong Kong’s dai pai dongs. Later, in the 1920s, brick-and-mortar chifa restaurants opened their doors in that neighborhood and eventually took over the thoroughfare of Calle Capón, which became the heart of Barrio Chino.

The author’s grandfather patrolled Barrio Chino as a young police officer. *photo from Vera family archives*

Those early chifas occupied existing colonial-era or turn-of-the-century buildings with plain cement or brick facades and ornamental wood balconies. Only the exterior neon signage and a few Chinese characters hinted at their offerings. The oldest among them was the self-proclaimed “Gran Chifa,” San Joy Lao. Although the restaurant’s menu has remained largely unchanged for a century, the building has undergone an upgrade. Its entrance is now a paifang-style slanted rooftop with red tiles, a visual echo of the gate half a block away that has marked the entrance to Barrio Chino since 1971—four large red columns topped with a green tiled arch.

Barrio Chino flourished but it did not expand much geographically in the crowded capital. The perimeter of Lima’s Chinatown has always been constrained by the Rimac River to the north, and the city’s main plaza and Barrios Altos to the west and east, respectively. Spilling outwards from the Chinatown gate entrance at the corner of Jirón Andahuaylas and Calle Capón, Barrio Chino extends about three blocks south to Jirón Puno, two blocks north to Jirón Junin, and eastward just past Jirón Paruro. Today, it is still essentially the same neighborhood that my grandfather patrolled in the 1940s.

Looking at an old map of Lima from 1904, I quickly located Mercado Central and pored over the public buildings situated in its vicinity: monuments, churches and convents, train stations, hospitals, and “cuarteles” or police station barracks. My grandfather was stationed in the second of Lima’s six police stations, and the label “Cuartel Segundo” spanned the area around Barrio Chino and Barrios Altos.

When my grandfather walked Calle Capón 80 years ago, it was a single-lane one-way street for automobiles. Nowadays, Calle Capón is a pedestrian walkway. The buildings themselves have not changed much, but the addition of the Chinatown gate and a few paifang architectural renovations have given the neighborhood an appearance more similar to Chinatowns around the globe.

Vintage chifa advertisements from *Cascabel* magazine, 1935. *photo from Wikimedia Commons*

Mercado Central

Barrio Chino’s proximity to Lima’s central market was instrumental in fostering the culinary fusion of chifa.

In colonial-era Lima, creole street food vendors set up posts at the city’s many plazas, resulting in chaotic and unsanitary conditions. In the mid-19th century, the city decided to build Mercado Central to house its produce vendors. Mercado Central occupied an entire city block on the edge of Barrio Chino and became Lima’s largest central market. From 1905 until 1964, a modern two-story brick building with metal beams, cement floors, and tile stands contained the bustling wholesale hub. After it was destroyed by fire in the mid-1960s, a reconstruction was built and still stands today.

But the 1940s version of Mercado Central is the one my mother frequented as a child. According to her recollections, trucks laden with pantry items, fruits, vegetables, and seafood pulled up at the market every morning around 4am. The vendors would have included indigenous migrants from the Andes, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and Afro-descendants. Not long afterwards, customers would start to queue outside, including my mother—then six years old—who walked to Mercado Central from her tenement home, accompanied by adult neighbors. After the market threw open its doors at 6am, it would soon be crowded with working-class Limeños as diverse as the vendors—shopping for the day’s ingredients to prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This was the daily routine for families in the neighborhood, as their tenement homes lacked refrigerators.

Since the 1920s, Mercado Central has provided chifa restaurants not only with fresh seafood, but also with uniquely Peruvian ingredients: native peppers such as aji amarillo and aji limo, as well as the dehydrated Andean potato known as chuño. In Andean cuisine, chuño is reconstituted into a vegetable soup, but chifa cooks grind chuño into flour thicken a sweet-and-sour tamarind sauce. The salsa de tamarindo served nowadays by chifa restaurants contains no tamarind fruit—instead, the sauce is made from tomato, vinegar, and sugar. My parents remember fondly the salsa de tamarindo of yesteryear. It was darker than the reddish sauce of today, and not as sweet.

But there is another ingredient that came to define chifa, and which made Chinese-Peruvian cuisine different from Chinese food anywhere else. That ingredient is criollismo, the creole essence of Limeños that shapes everything from food and music, to language and art. To be creole in Peru is to honor one’s Andean, Spanish, African, or Asian heritage. A Chinese immigrant in Peru becomes criollo when they marry a Peruvian woman, and starts drinking pisco sours with their ceviche for lunch. Their tusán children born in Peru continue this criollismo when they cook the classic Peruvian dish lomo saltado—strips of beef, red onion feathers, tomato wedges, and french fries all stir-fried in a wok with soy sauce, ginger, and ají amarillo pepper.

Today, Wong supermarkets in Lima offer home cooks a wide variety of sauces used to prepare chifa. *photo by Mauricio Vera*

From Chinese Bodega to Supermarket

Mercado Central was by no means the only place to buy Chinese ingredients in Lima. One could also go to the Chinese bodegas. During the mid-20th century, these shops seemed to occupy almost every street corner, especially in working-class neighborhoods. Limeños stopped by these bodegas for various groceries, canned goods, charcuterie, and housewares. The Chinese or Chinese-Peruvian families who ran these bodegas sold a bit of everything, not just chifa ingredients like soy sauce.

From one of these bodegas, opened in 1942 by a man named Erasmo Wong, grew the Wong supermarket chain, which has about a dozen stores throughout Lima today. The stores are filled with chifa ingredients, some labeled by their Cantonese name: kion (ginger), cebolla china (scallion), holantao (snow peas), and frejol chino (bean sprouts). There are also shelves devoted to wantan wrappers, fideos (egg noodles), and rice vermicelli.

One can also find a wide range of chifa sauces and condiments: sillao (soy sauce), mensi (soy sauce with garlic), salsa de tamarindo (sweet-and-sour sauce), aceite de ajonjoli (sesame oil), and ajoikion (soy sauce with ginger and garlic). There is also aji-no-sillao, the soy sauce produced by Ajinomoto, the company that popularized MSG in chifas, and which also sells an all-purpose aji-no-mix chifa seasoning.

In the true spirit of criollismo, Wong supermarket also sells panetón—the fruit bread that Italian immigrants introduced to Lima and which is now more popular in Peru than in Milan—stacked on the top shelf above the salsa de sillao.

The heart of Barrio Chino is Calle Capón, a bustling pedestrian walkway lined with chifas. *photo by Mauricio Vera*

Childhood Chifa Memories

My parents left Peru and moved abroad in the early 1970s—first to the Dominican Republic and then to Canada, which they’ve called home for over 30 years. As a result, my memories of Lima are a fragmented collage of our annual family visits for the Christmas and New Year holidays, when it is summer in Peru.

For my parents, dining out at a chifa was for special occasions—birthdays, graduations, quinceañeras, anniversaries—and so all of our family reunions in Lima quite naturally revolved around food. We often had lunch at a chifa named Lung Fung. It had a tiled roof, neon sign, green dragons, and large wooden doors. Inside, sliding paper screens separated off the main dining section from a set of rooms that faced an interior garden.

My grandfather always liked to start one of these meals with a family-sized bowl of sopa wantan for everybody to share. While the grownups decided on the rest of the menu, the children (myself, siblings, and cousins) played in the garden. There was a small wooden bridge over a pond, where we would gather to count the fish of different colors. Inevitably, to the dismay and laughter of the adults, a distracted cousin would trip and fall into the pond. As they emerged, soaking-wet, the staff would gladly bring over a pile of cloth napkins from the table to dry them off.

Lunch is the largest meal of the day in Lima, and our chifa feasts lingered for the better part of the afternoon, perhaps because the warmth of this restaurant made it feel like a home. What I remember the most about my childhood chifa reunions is the joy spreading across generations, from my grandparents to my parents and siblings and all of our relatives.

Toronto

When my parents first moved to Canada, there was no Peruvian community or Peruvian restaurants to welcome them. A couple of times a month, they cooked arroz chaufa or tallarines saltados at home. Because Toronto had so many Chinese neighborhoods, however, it only made sense that they would seek out Cantonese restaurants that reminded them of Lima’s chifas.

One family favorite was Lee Garden in Toronto’s Chinatown. To be clear, this was not a Chinese-Peruvian chifa. It was a Cantonese restaurant, but to my parents it might as well have been a chifa in Lima. The restaurant did not accept reservations, so there was always a long line outside, but my parents showed up early to get their names on the queue, and my mother was never shy about flagging down our favorite waiter to let them know we were waiting.

Just like our chifa reunions in Lima, our lunch and dinner outings at Lee Garden often had three generations sharing a family-style meal. My mother’s parents, who lived in Toronto part-time, loved eating out at Lee Garden. My grandfather, in particular, was always so enthusiastic about the wonton soup that he slurped it loudly with a shaking hand and a big grin. On the streets of Toronto’s Chinatown, he fit right in. Like some people from the Andes, my grandfather had an Asian complexion. Maybe it was his dark wrinkly features, how he squinted when he smiled, or the way he dressed with a beret, scarf, sweater and corduroy jacket. Perhaps it was how he walked with a shuffle in his loafers. Or it could be that the side streets of Toronto’s Chinatown brought back memories from a lifetime ago, when he patrolled Barrio Chino as a young beat cop and often received offers of sopa wantan to ward off the chill.

One time, after lunch at Lee Garden, my grandfather shuffled off across the street to a Chinese market. I ran outside to look for him because he was 90 years old and didn’t speak English. To my surprise, I saw him talking with an older Chinese man outside the market. They dressed similarly and looked like old friends, but I can’t imagine how they were able to carry on a conversation. My grandfather spoke in Spanish and the other man in Cantonese, yet somehow they shared a few words and a few smiles.

The famous San Joy Lao chifa in Barrio Chino, pictured here in 1961, serves the same menu today as it did a hundred years ago. *photo from El Comercio*

Hong Kong

Despite their fondness for the chifas of Lima and Chinese restaurants of Toronto, I don’t think my parents ever expected to visit one of the cradles of Cantonese cuisine, Hong Kong. Six years ago, however, while planning a trip to the Philippines for a family wedding, we discovered that our connecting flight included a layover in Hong Kong. The opportunity was too good to pass up. We decided to stay there for a few days, and I made a map with walking routes, restaurants, and local sights.

For my parents, it was a wonderful experience to be immersed in a city that was entirely a Barrio Chino. It turns out we had already visited Hong Kong many times through the films of Wong Kar-wai, those visually stunning stories about perpetual longing. So my parents knew what to expect when traversing the boisterous Lan Kwai Fong in search of a chifa, and they peered over the railing of the Central-Mid-Levels escalator to watch the crowds at the wet markets and dai pai dong stalls. Even the bustling city center and traffic reminded them of Lima, as did the smell of the ocean when we took the Star Ferry to Kowloon to visit Chungking Mansion—a 17-story tenement that is home to large immigrant families crammed into studio apartments alongside shops and restaurants—as well as the setting of one of their favorite Wong Kar-wai films, Chungking Express.

During our few days in Hong Kong, we had dim sum every morning for brunch. For our dinners, however, we gravitated towards the dishes that reminded us of chifa: sopa wantan to start our meal, fried rice, noodles, and steamed fish. This could be Lima, minus the criollismo perhaps.

I was so intrigued by our brief time in Hong Kong that I returned on my own a few years later. One of the first things I did was to book several food-themed walking tours of the city. I wanted to explore every corner, taste everything, and maybe along the way find the origins of chifa. To start conversations with locals, I told them where I was from and about Chinese-Peruvian cuisine. In turn, they told me that the word chifa sounded similar to the Cantonese 煮飯 (zyu faan) which means “to cook rice.” I experienced the same strong feeling of familiarity in Hong Kong that my parents felt during our first visit. Because of Peru’s strong connection to Cantonese culture, I believe any Limeño who visits Hong Kong would feel the same way.

“I see chifa as frozen in time—a snapshot of two worlds coming together”

If my grandfather had visited Hong Kong, he might have found the narrow streets similar to those he walked in Barrio Chino, though with more connecting steps, taller buildings, and lush tropical greenery. He might point out how different the Hong Kong police uniforms are from the one he wore in the 1940s or be surprised at how the former Police Married Quarters dormitory has been renovated into the hip PMQ complex that now houses shops, galleries, and restaurants. But he would definitely fit in any restaurant that served his favorite chifa dish, wonton soup.

On one of the food tours, the guide led our group down to a basement with no visible sign at street level. It was a small restaurant that only served wonton soup. In the steaming open kitchen, two women cooked the soup, moving quickly and efficiently in a tight space. One folded the dumplings by hand, using swift movements that she must have performed countless times, and the other oversaw the soup and cooked the wontons. Their technique consisted of boiling the wontons in batches separate from the soup, which I later learned was done not only to preserve the liquid volume of the stock but also to prevent a cluster of wontons from breaking up in the stock.

Before sitting down with the rest of the tour group to slurp our soups, I approached the kitchen and made eye contact with the woman working the wontons. Holding up an imaginary camera to my right eye, I put my right index finger on the shutter button, and politely asked, “Photo OK?” What I really wanted was to ask permission to learn from them: “May I please climb over the counter and cook with you?”

When the steaming bowl arrived at my table, I was surprised to see it contained only wontons and noodles in the soup. In Lima, sopa wantan also typically features a few large chunks of pork or chicken in the soup—more like a ramen, perhaps. Maybe the wonton soup in Lima originated from another part of China, or perhaps cooks in Peru had modified it by adding ingredients from Mercado Central.

The food tour also stopped at several wet markets, where I saw stall after stall of familiar vegetables, such as fresh bok choy and scallions. What stood out to me as different from Chinese markets I had frequented in Lima or Toronto were the stacks of dried fruit and fruit peels and the dried fish hanging in the street stalls. Some of the dried fruit and vegetables were even prepackaged in what seemed to be culinary or medicinal combinations—with instructions to just add water.

On one night tour near the famed Temple Street market, it was just me and the guide, a British expat who works as a chef in Hong Kong. He took me to a diner that has been around since the 1950s and ordered fried wontons with a sweet-and-sour stew of vegetables, pineapple and squid. This meal was visually very different from any chifa dishes I knew—which nearly always include either noodles or rice—but the flavors were familiar. My tour guide must have noticed how intrigued I was by the food.

“Are you a chef?” he asked.

I nodded, because my mouth was full of wonton. Then I smiled and asked him, “Have you heard of chifa?”

Wonton soup in Hong Kong. *photo by Nico Vera*

Tomorrow in Hong Kong, Yesterday in Lima, Today in Portland

A few years after our trip to Hong Kong, my parents and I watched the film It’s Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong. Set in Central and Kowloon, the romantic comedy takes viewers on a walking tour of the city. The title of the film comes from a character who tells a team of investors that they are always behind the Asian financial markets. “Let’s hustle, people,” he says. “It’s already tomorrow in Hong Kong.”

For me, that statement seems to sum up the culinary similarities and differences between Lima and Hong Kong.

It’s clear to me now that the roots of chifa are Cantonese cuisine but its heart is Peru’s creole culture. I’ve come to realize that Cantonese cuisine is infinitely diverse, with dishes that never made the transpacific journey to Lima. I see chifa as frozen in time—a snapshot of two worlds coming together in the early 1900s in Lima: the cooking of Cantonese immigrants and Lima’s creole families in Barrio Chino and Mercado Central. That’s what makes chifa a profoundly nostalgic cuisine.

In Hong Kong, I enjoyed many traditional dishes, such as a simple bowl of tofu with bean sauce, but I noticed a momentum toward a more modern culinary aesthetic. One of my favorite restaurants there, Sohofama in the PMQ building, describes itself as “modern Chinese comfort” and sources local organic ingredients, some from their own hydroponic urban garden. They blend a little bit of old and a little bit of new, and pair it all with local rice wine and cocktails. Hong Kong is also home to several Michelin-starred restaurants, some which serve refined or innovative dim sum, for example. But in Lima, chifa restaurants shun modernity.

For almost a century, the dishes that Chinese immigrants first cooked in Barrio Chino are the ones that thousands of chifa restaurants across Peru have on their menus. Chifa is first and foremost the food of Lima’s working-class families, but even the more expensive chifas that cater to the city’s upper-class serve the same dishes. This nostalgia for tradition forges the expectation that the chifa in one neighborhood and the chifa across town or another part of the country will serve the same dishes that Peruvians crave.

Years have passed since my visits to Hong Kong as well as the last time I taught a chifa class. Since then, I’ve turned vegan. So now I cook with plant-based ingredients for friends and my family in our Portland home. For the past two years, I’ve also been working on veganizing some of my favorite Peruvian creole and chifa dishes. Take arroz chaufa, for example. To make it vegan, I needed to replace the egg and chicken. In one version, I used Just Egg, an off-the-shelf liquid product that looks like runny yolks but is made from mung beans and cooks up like chicken eggs. I also substituted strips of soy curls that resembled the texture and color of chicken when pan-fried.

I have found that cooking with plants is a challenging, creative, and rewarding process. Sometimes I can easily find a product that can replace the original ingredient; other times, the task is to find out what works best through trial-and-error. What really matters to me, what I strive to preserve, is the history of each dish and the family stories they represent. In the end, I think my approach to cooking today is much like that of the first Chinese people who settled in Lima’s Barrio Chino, craving familiar flavors in a new land. Like them, I am an immigrant. I just happen to be a vegan Peruvian chef living in the Pacific Northwest, who is using local ingredients to cook dishes that evoke the comfort of home.

Banner photo from the coleccíon Vladimir Velasquez, Lima Antigua