TASTE OF PERU
CORA CORA IN WEST HARTFORD PERFECTS FAMILY-SPUN PERUVIAN RECIPES
The seed was planted when Macarena and Grecia Ludena came with their parents to America from a town called Coracora in Peru. Working with what they had, and seeing an opportunity in the capital region, Hector Ludena and Luisa Jimenez, the restaurant’s first chef, opened Cora Cora in 2011. With Connecticut roots that stretch all the way to South America, a new generation is overseeing its growth into the future.
Cora Cora’s location in West Hartford is easy to find, but a bit surprising to behold. The square plan and large parking lot tickles my brain with some memory just out of reach. The door handles ... I know these. I look at the tile floor, ask a server: yes, he says. This used to be a McDonald’s. They even kept the drive-thru.
“So many!” says new chef Macarena Ludena when I ask how many meals are picked up through a car window at the James Beard Award-nominated eatery.
People will often start their day with drive-thru orders of the chaufa, Peruvianstyle fried rice with peppers, scallions and chopped egg with soy sauce. “We can have 30, 40 percent of our business on a night at the drive-thru and deliveries. We make sure the orders which come through are up to the standard we have inside.” She adds that they’re happy people in the community still make the effort to have Cora Cora’s food, even when they can’t come inside.
It began with the women’s father running the front of the house, a position now held by Grecia, with their mother in the kitchen. “The dishes she made, it’s what she made before, at home,” Macarena says of their parents’ legacy.
Waitressing and creating drinks at the bar in high school was a very different experience from when Macarena began helping her mother in a commercial kitchen, but she liked to cook, and was torn between the idea of a university education or going into the family business. “Seeing how many people we were serving, seeing what my mother and father did, how they worked to make this life for us, I said, ‘I’m going to be here for my family. I’m going to be a chef.’ ”
At first, things were difficult for Macarena as the only woman in the kitchen while her parents partially transitioned into retirement. But she learned her mother’s home-spun recipes, while simultaneously attending culinary school, and weaving in new techniques. She did every job in the kitchen, changed food prep and other aspects to make it easier on her coworkers, updated the dishes’ looks. “I became the leader,” she says. “They respected me.”
One of the changes was going from the looks- and tastes-right, “a little of this,” “cook that for a while” method born from decades of her mother’s experience, to more organized recipes capable of consistently producing the same excellent dishes for the ever-growing number of diners Cora Cora was attracting.
Macarena is quick to point out she’s still actively collaborating with her mother, sometimes updating dishes to fit the culinary atmosphere of West Hartford. Vegan ceviche is on the menu now, along with a plant-based tamal (although you can still get the traditional pork variation). “We have a community here,” she says of West Hartford. “And we do everything from scratch here, so if you need one thing taken out, we don’t want you to worry. We can do it.”
Macarena talks about the core experience of making her country’s food in America — providing this welcoming atmosphere without losing the authenticity. “Peppers, onions, garlic — this is how we start everything. Aji amarillo or aji
panca, you have to start with these. If the ingredients aren’t Peruvian, how can it be Peruvian food?”
The ingredients are in everything, starting with the green aji sauce and crispy corn which arrive on the table as your Peruvian amuse-bouche.
Authentic ingredients were exceptionally hard to find during the pandemic, and Macarena talks about trips to New York, tracking ships, singling out items like Peruvian purple corn, paying more to keep the quality.
A note on that purple corn: it’s used to make chicha morada, a soft drink I was delighted to have again after too long an absence. It’s made in house with corn juice, a little pineapple, cloves and cinnamon from Peru (this is important, Macarena says: “it’s more mild, a different kind of spice”). The ingredients are then boiled for hours, given a hint of lime juice, and served over Macarena’s signature roseshaped ice cubes. I could drink this smooth, sweet, antioxidant-rich concoction by the pint.
But I don’t, because the cocktails are calling. I opt for an Inca Azteca, a blend of pisco, tequila, lime and simple syrup, served with a (real) Maraschino cherry and fragrant wheel of dried blood orange. My companion for the evening is treated to a show with her drink, as a smokefilled glass lid lifts off the tray to reveal a sweet, pisco-based La Patrona.
We then order the entire menu, more or less.
If you do Peruvian, then you must have potatoes. That’s the rule. Hungry for a hit of aji amarillo, the papas la huancaína first catch my eye. Smothered in the mild, fragrantly spicy sauce, the sliced, skinless potatoes are crowned with a hard-boiled egg and slivers of deeply flavorful Peruvian botija olives. The vegetarian tamal has a familiar density from the cornmeal dough, but feels lighter with a mixed vegetable filling, and bright with the spicier aji panca sauce. The house empanadas are served three ways: with chicken, lomo and a guava/cheese blend. The plump, inviting half-moons had all been dusted with powdered sugar. This is pleasing to the eye, but curiously sweet to my taste.
More of a carnivore? Order the recommended anticuchos: sliced and grilled veal heart on a stick. The meat is lightly marinated, and is cooked to a thin medium rare. I prefer it with drops of the more fiery aji panca sauce provided.
Ceviche is another standard, and Cora Cora offers options with black tiger shrimp, squid, barramundi and more, served in aji limo, or with their special Tiger’s Milk. This citrus-based sauce is made with additional ginger, garlic and stock, and can be used to cure the seafood in ceviche, or as a standalone shot, to be sipped between bites, or applied as you like it to any dish on the menu.
Sipped alongside the arroz con mariscos
— sort of a South American paella — the Tiger’s Milk is eye-opening. At just $6 and packed with flavor, I recommend it. Oh, you know they have the popular
lomo saltado. The strips of soy- and aji amarillo-marinated steak are served over hand-cut fingerling potatoes with slivers of sweet, crunchy red onion, and the nearly melted umami of cooked tomatoes. If you go to Cora Cora for this alone, you won’t be disappointed.
Lomo saltado is absolutely standard Peruvian, and done very well at Cora Cora, but there are other delights in store, like the aji de gallina: shredded chicken in a pecan aji amarillo sauce, with boiled potatoes, those killer botija olives, and Parmesan cheese. It’s kept perky with the zesty sauce, but the overall gestalt is serene and satisfying, a willful trend at the restaurant.
“We emphasize the comfort, Peruvian home cooking kind of food,” chef Macarena says. “I discuss this so much with my mother, how I want Americans who are always having ceviche, lomo saltado, to know we have all these wonderful foods in our kitchens at home.”
“We have a lot of Italian influence in Peru, and we’re looking to add a risotto dish for the winter, warm food. I’m experimenting with pestos, but I’ve played with the recipes, and sometimes I get it right and think, ‘Oh wow, it tastes like Peru!’ We’re creating these memories of flavor with people.”
This, then, is how we came to try a side of tallarin verde. This Peruvian fettuccine in pesto is usually served with a ribeye at Cora Cora, but is delicious — and surprising — on its own.
Another surprise: the parihuela levante
muertos. A soup to raise the dead ?Ihadto know what that meant. Macarena laughs.
“In Peru when we have too much to drink, and you wake up in the morning and you feel like dying, you have a parihuela to get you up again.” A Peruvian hangover cure, then, made with a reef ’s worth of fish, scallops, black tiger shrimp, octopus and mussels, flavored and reddened with aji panca. As the ghost of many a drink has left a fur boot in my mouth to mark its passage, I have a deep, personal interest in this claim. Expect future updates.
Whether it is repairing the recently shattered, or recreating memories of home, it’s all of a theme at Cora Cora. “I like cooking comfort food,” Macarena says. “Every day we’re trying something new, but it’s love. It comes back to cooking with love. We want people to feel like they’re coming into a home, to forget you’re in a restaurant, our servers taking care of you. You just enjoy the food.” Cora Cora 162 Shield St., West Hartford 860-953-2672, coracoract.com, @coracoract on Instagram
Open daily for lunch and dinner Wheelchair accessible