September 11, 2002

By Paul Reidinger

AT LIM& oacute;n (the Peruvian-fusion place that opened toward the end of July in the original Panchita's space), you can order a soft drink called Inca Kola. It is a bubbling fluid of a luminescent yellow, Gatorade-ish color not found in nature, it tastes like a pleasant, sugary mix of bubble gum and cream soda, and despite the dramatic name, it's bottled by the Coca-Cola Co. It's also, by far, the least interesting thing available from a restaurant whose slightly gritty location, small size, and spare decor belie the exquisiteness of (if I may cite the handsome business card) its "Peruvian" (hence "Inca Kola") and "Nuevo Latino fusion" food.

The news that the flavors of Latin America lend themselves with particular fluency to artful reinterpretation isn't really news: Maya, Destino, and Alma have all been going great guns along these lines in recent years. The real news is that Limón achieves a comparable triumph in a far less elaborate space with far less money, for considerably less money. If it's Latin American fusion you crave and you're on a budget, Limón is just the place you've been looking for.

Caveat: It's noisy. We showed up for one visit fairly early on a weekday night, with only a few other tables filled and the sound system pumping away, and were able to have a conversation without shouting. But by the time we left, most of the tables were full and we were shouting. And friends we recommended the place to showed up mid-evening on a Saturday and were nearly driven mad by the roar. The sound system is not exactly delicate, and the space is done up in that spare, postmodern urban style (lots of hard surfaces, no acoustic materials) I associate with the late '90s and its noise-craving crowds.

This sort of connivance – trying to make a snug space seem fuller than it is – hardly seems necessary, particularly since the space is in fact quite full much of the time. So there's no need for trickery; and no wonder it's full, for Limón is a kind of Shangri-la of sauces, reminiscent somehow of French or Indian cooking, but with distinctively American flavors. The only sad thing about the sauces is that there's apparently no Peruvian equivalent to naan (the remarkably useful Indian bread) to mop their remains with. For that you must rely on competent but unremarkable French bread, which doesn't exactly announce "Peru" or even "fusion" but does unobtrusively get the job done.

The two best sauces are the chile-influenced Peruvian red cream sauce of the picante de mariscos ($13.25) – something like a cross between bouillabaisse and gumbo and heavy with calamari, shrimp, bay scallops, mussels, and clams – and the almost Southeast Asian-style bath of coconut cream, saffron, white wine, and pancetta accompanying the sautéed mussels ($7.25). Both sauces are nicely thickened but still supple; you could easily imagine tossing them with pasta or squirting them over roasted vegetables.

Others are on the tasty side of shy. Slices of boiled potato ($4.75) are slathered with a white cheese sauce, making a kind of near-gratin (with a few black olives scattered about for counterpoint), while pollo merengue ($7.25) consists of chicken strips sautéed in a "creamy Peruvian sauce" that had no identifiable flavor. On the recommendation of a friend (who loved the food and nearly died of the roar), we tried the calamares fritos ($7.25), crisply breaded and dabbed with a chipotle aioli whose color was an orange version of the Inca Kola's yellow.

The house specialty is roast chicken. You can get a whole bird for $14.25, a half for $7.95, or a quarter for $4.75; all three choices include chubby french fries and a well-dressed green salad. The whole thing would be only slightly above ordinary if it weren't for (of course) the creamy yellow-pepper sauce served on the side. It brings a note of luxurious snap to the plate.

Limón serves lunch but doesn't have a separate lunch menu, which means you order from the dinner menu, which means you could easily drop $20 or more per person at noon if you wanted an appetizer and a main dish. A better way is simply to graze, tapas-style, among the appetizers, many of which are large enough to qualify as small main dishes and, as a friend pointed out, offer in the main more interesting combinations and preparations. Four appetizers for two people turned out to be a more than ample repast; afterward, we even walked out of the bakery across the street empty-handed despite the profusion of cookies and other enticing sweets that had first lured us in.

Limón means "lemon" in Spanish, but even if you don't speak Spanish you'd probably be able to figure at least that much out, since the restaurant is a lemon-limey yellow (or maybe Meyer lemon yellow, though not Inca Kola yellow) outside and in: facade, walls, artwork, chair backs. The color beckons, and also, like a blinking hazard light, cautions: Noise is us.