It’s been a long week of school. Trying to learn a year’s worth of content plus student teaching in five weeks is tough. Having been out of the classroom for 35 years doesn’t lessen the difficulty any, either.
After 12 hours of working on ‘school’ I headed home to my ‘Eagles Nest’ at the El Mirador del Inka hostel. Two miles high, and then some, I cough and wheeze for enough oxygen to make it up the endless stone steps every time. I fell down on my bed to let the blood get back to my head, lungs, legs and brain.
I think it was about that time that I realized all I’d eaten that was a banana. Oxygen wasn’t the only great need in my life. Looking around my room, I didn’t see the makings of a meal. Nick and I woofed down all the good stuff last night while I was telling him how badly he’s going to miss my daughter.
Cusco is a good place to be hungry. Not only is food very affordable, if you know where to go it can also be exciting. Putting on my warmest clothes to go out into the fast chilling evening, I walked less than 200 meters to Nuna Machay. This Peruvian restaurant is located on a steep alley way in EV’s and my San Blas neighborhood of Cusco. The owner/chef, Jose, is a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu and trained at Ritz Carlton hotels in the U.S. He is from Lima and Virginia and speaks unaccented English and Spanish.
Nuna Machay takes up about an 20 by 30foot piece of real estate, two stories high. It has live music most nights of the week. There are a few tall bar stools and a few short ones downstairs with larger seats for dining up. When I walked in, Jose was behind the bar, in front of the stove and near his laptop which provides the music until the band arrives. “Hey Jose, what’s good tonight?”
he menu is whatever he has on hand and feels like cooking. Well, there is a menu in writing but I’ve only seen it once and it wasn’t what Jose was doing that night.
“I suggest the pot roast.”
(Pot Roast, are you kidding me? My mother made pot roast. Fatty meat and boiled vegetables; it was awful. I swore three decades ago I’d never eat Pot Roast again.)
“Really, tell me about it.”
Jose gave me a two minute explanation worthy of his alma mater. Since he didn’t give me another option, Pot Roast it was.
First I saw him fry up some rice til it was crispy and he seasoned it with something I couldn’t identify but smelled inviting. Jose made a béchamel-like sauce, sautéed some green beans, onions, red peppers, made a reduction of some beef broth and pulled two perfectly round tournedos of beef out of ‘the pot’. The dish arrived looking like a surrealist painting model. It was too pretty to disturb but the aroma was too delightful to stay away.
The beef was tender enough to cut with a fork and tasted nothing like that crap my mother made . It sat atop the rice and vegetables which were covered by the white sauce. The reduction sauce was artistically spread on the rounds of meat.
I was the only patron. Jose talked about Peruvian cuisine (he insists that Cusco has none), playing the proper music for maximum growth of American tomatoes and the restaurant demographics of San Blas. No Peruvians eat there.
My bill came to twenty soles. The bottle of beer I drank with dinner was half of the total. His masterpiece cost less than four bucks. The experience was like being in a friend’s kitchen. If your friend is Wolfgang Puck.
After dinner I went to a local ‘Tiende’ to buy a bottle of water and some shampoo, which cost more than dinner.
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