Inka dinka do

By Paul Reidinger

› paulr@sfbg.com

You are hereby pardoned for wondering if Inkas, the name recently installed on the face of the old Rock Soup, might be some kind of bookstore-with-coffee-bar in the Barnes and Noble mode — "ink" and so forth. (There is a fancy new coffee establishment just across the street: an outpost of Muddy Waters, in yet another of those spanking new buildings that seem to have popped up overnight.) Sounding out the name Inkas leads one to an alternate spelling, Incas, the aboriginal people of Peru, and to the delightful truth that Inkas is, in fact, a Peruvian restaurant.

Of the world's many rustic cuisines represented in the city's food conclave, none has gone upscale with quite the rocketlike trajectory of Peruvian. Ten years ago our choices in this area were limited, consisting of Fina Estampa, Alejandro's, Mi Lindo Peru, and little else. Today both Limón and Fresca have gilded reputations and cater to the well-to-do, while Circolo (a Limón semi-spin-off) gives the cuisine a Studio 54 party gloss. Even Mi Lindo Peru, a onetime redoubt of rusticity just across the street from Inkas, has shined its shoes and polished its menu and opened a sibling restaurant in the Marina.

The attainment of fame and wealth is of course the most American of stories, and one cannot begrudge our Peruvian restaurateurs their success, for there is a strong case to be made that Peruvian food, with its natural east-west axis and its sophisticated use of maritime, tropical, and highland bounty, has a dynamism that makes it one of the world's great cuisines. Still, it is important to keep a sense of rootedness, and that is what you feel when you step into Inkas.

The building, on a busy stretch of outer Mission Street, is unmistakable. It looks like a bank because it once was a bank: the American Trust Company, whose dignified plaster medallions can still be seen on the wall above the narrow mezzanine. (The mezzanine is full of fabulous possibilities, incidentally, but since there doesn't seem to be ready access to it from the main dining floor, it is for the moment used — wasted is what I really mean — as a storage area.) On a cold winter night, the boxy, high-ceilinged space can seem a little shadowed and chilly, but there is a candle flickering on every table, plenty of bustle in the open kitchen, and a continuous outflow of warmth from the food.

The note of friendly heat is struck from the first, when a basket of French bread appears, accompanied by a glass pot of yellowish aji paste, a Peruvian answer to salsa. The aji is a Peruvian chili of moderate fire, and mashed with a little lemon juice and salt, it becomes an addictive, and presumably heart-friendly, substitute for butter.

One of the treasures that seems to get lost in the upscale shuffle when undertaken by local Peruvian restaurants is roast chicken. In the beginning, at both the original Limón (on 17th Street) and the original Fresca (on West Portal), roast chicken was the marquee item, and it is again at Inkas ($18 for a whole bird, $10 for a half bird). And it is terrific: an envelope of crackly, bronzed, spice-scented skin enclosing depths of juicy, tender meat. The chicken could not be better, and even the faintly disappointing fries on the side (not quite crisp or salty enough) don't detract.

The kitchen, in fact, seems to do less with potatoes than is typical in Peruvian restaurants: just the B-list fries. Yams and yucca root, on the other hand, pop up all over, the former as a pair of squat cylinders at the edge of a plate of ceviche mixto ($11) — shrimp, purple squid, shucked mussels, and chunks of cod in an intense bath of lime juice — and the latter, deep-fried, as a stand-alone item ($3) and also as an accompaniment to deep-fried calamari ($8). I like calamari and even deep-fried calamari, but there is such a thing as too much deep-fried food.

Better seafood choices include parihuela ($8), a rust-red tomato-chili broth stocked with shrimp, scallops, and mussels, and picante de mariscos ($14), yet another reprise of the usual-suspects seafood gang (shrimp, mussels, cod, et cetera), sautéed here in a mild, creamy aji sauce. We found seco ($9.50), chunks of beef simmered in a cilantro sauce, to be tasty if slightly tough (should the meat have been braised rather than sautéed?), while pollo a la parilla ($10) — a boneless breast crusted with spices and grilled — was tender but a bit tame and in need of a sauce.

Inkas offers a lunchtime special ($10) that changes with the day of the week but always includes soup and a main dish, each in a substantial serving. There could hardly be a more rustic soup than sancochado de carne, a nominally beefy soup that held only a single scrap of beef (tender, this time) but a wealth of shredded cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and yucca root in a light vegetable broth. A main course like arroz con pollo, on the other hand, sounds as though it will be the height of yeoman-style cooking but turns out to feature a small mountain of cilantro-green rice dotted with green peas, like a California hillside strewn with mossy boulders in spring.

Desserts are standard-issue and none the worse for it. The choices include picarones ($4.50), freshly fried doughnuts in a honey sauce, and alfajores, the white cookies held together Oreo-style by a layer of dulce de leche, the Latin American delicacy in which sugar is caramelized in milk. Here we have a fail-safe formula, the kind you can take to the bank. *

INKAS

Lunch: Daily, 11 a.m.–3 p.m. Dinner: Sun.–Thurs., 5:30–9:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–10 p.m.

3299 Mission, SF

(415) 648-0111

MC/V

Beer and wine

Not noisy

Wheelchair accessible