South, south of the border

By Paul Reidinger

AT YUNZA RESTAURANT , in the heart of the Western Addition, you will find (I quote from the menu) "South American" food – Mexican too. First you have to get in the door, which in the evening can involve a twinkle-toes ballet past knots of idling teenagers drifting to and from souped-up cars that sit much too low to the ground. The street scene along Fillmore is very American Graffiti goes to the big city. There's lots of energy, and the energy has an edge. But you're hungry, you have heard intimations of Venezuelan food, you nod and waltz inside.

Once inside, you start wondering – or perhaps you were wondering even before. Some of us are natural, and inveterate, wonderers; you might say we are full of wonderlust. Confronted with a proclamation of South American food, including Peruvian, Colombian, Brazilian, and Venezuelan variants, you wonder what meanings these national distinctions carry, if any. As with the Middle East, the nation-state mapping of South America is less a reflection of local reality than of the preoccupations of faraway colonial powers. Prettily colored maps of the continent do not suggest the broad commonalities of religion and language (Portuguese-speaking Brazil being the major exception on the latter point) that have little or nothing to do with national boundaries.

To religion and language we might also add food. Yunza's excellent cooking demonstrates, if nothing else, that the "national" cuisines of Spanish-speaking America have far more in common than not. They make extensive use of black beans and rice, for instance, and of yucca root, plaintains, and cumin. At the same time there are some arresting local twists. One of the best of these is a Venezuelan green sauce called guasacaca; it is basically mashed avocado spiked with vinegar and turns up as an accompaniment to several dishes, among them yuquita frita ($3.50), which resemble supersized home fries. It can also be ordered on its own ($1.75) and makes a tart alternative to traditional guacamole for chip dipping.

For the uncertain and risk-averse, Yunza's menu offers plenty of reassuring standards. There is a selection of generously sized empanadas ($2.50), crescents of deep-fried corn dough (looking like crisped bananas) filled with cheese, shredded chicken, or beef and strongly scented with cumin. There's a bright and clean ceviche mixto ($9.25) of whitefish, squid, octopus, clams, and shrimps bathed in fresh lime juice. Just as familiar are the tostadas ($4.50), tortilla discs fried to crispness and topped with shredded lettuce and beef, onions, and sour cream. A subtle but satisfying variation on the tostada is the tostone ($3.75 for two), which substitutes a round of mashed, fried plaintain for the tortilla and is topped with spiced, shredded chicken, cheese, and avocado.

If only tacos and burritos will do, Yunza has them in a variety of guises, vegan, seafood, and low carb among them. That last is a nice touch, given the carb-heaviness of most of the rest of the menu. Many of the kitchen's memorable dishes are nearly smothered with various starchy combinations of beans, white rice, and french fries. In the case of the pabellon venezolano ($10.25), the bloat includes a pair of fried eggs plopped atop a heap of white rice. Fortunately the actual pabellon, a stew of shredded beef in a cumin-scented tomato sauce, is tasty and distinctive enough to shine anyway.

The carb-cutter in me would dispense with the fries and rice that come with the chicken saltado ($8), an almost Chinese-style preparation of spiced chicken strips sautéed with onions and tomatoes and topped with cilantro. Said cutter would also dump the rice piled beside the pollo agridulce ($9) with mango salsa – another eerily Chinese-like dish in which breaded, sautéed halves of a boneless chicken breast are glazed with a sweet-and-sour sauce. The Asian influences in Yunza's South American cooking lend weight, in a sense, to the anthropological speculation that the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, from the Inuit to the Inca and beyond, came from Indochina and, by foot or small boat, worked their way around the northern rim of the Pacific basin.

On the other hand, my inner carb-cutter would gladly have seconds on the arepas ($3.50), which resemble a cross between hamburger buns and pita bread (they are made from white cornmeal) and are stuffed with this and that. The reina pepiada version, for instance, features shredded chicken and avocado and seems very much like a chicken-salad sandwich. And the carb-cutter has no objection at all to the chicharrón de calamar ($5.75), bite-sized pieces of deep-fried calamari – nice for dipping in guasacaca, whose acidity cuts the oiliness.

In matters of dessert, of course, the ICC is dismissed – sent to his room, as it were, so as not to spoil the party of sweets. Nonetheless, you are likely to have ordered with abandon (having been tempted by so many treats, familiar and not) and so to have reached the end of your meal's savory interval feeling ... sated. Yet you must not miss the discreet splendor of the torta tres leches ($3), a tiramisu-like slab of sponge cake soaked in sweet milk and rum. A single slab does very nicely as a last treat for two – or four – prestuffed people, even people who don't like tiramisu. People like me, if you were wondering.