Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  These days, the immigrants to Paterson come from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, India, Palestine, and Peru. There are still factory jobs but only a fraction of what were once here. The city is a relic of giant abandoned factories where the people outnumber available jobs. I am walking along the historic meat market in downtown Paterson. Through the window of a corner market, I see hundreds of live chickens crammed into holding pens. I go inside and ask the man behind the counter what they sell. He’s from Cuba. He’s wearing a white tank top undershirt and a gold chain around his neck. He points to a handwritten menu that lists chickens, ducks, guinea hens, turkeys, and “heavy fowl,” which are just older chickens. I am instructed not to take pictures. In order for me to stay, I have to buy something, so I order a white chicken, and the man behind the counter reaches into a cage and pulls one out by its neck. He weighs the chicken and sends it to the processing line. From where I stand, I can see only a stainless-steel sink and a few men with cleavers. But the feathers on the concrete floor tell me everything. I pay for my bird, and he tells me it will be ten minutes. The waiting room is painted a teal blue, and there is nothing in it but a few plastic chairs. When my freshly killed bird is ready, he hands it to me neatly wrapped in butcher paper inside a brown paper bag. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I’m staying in a hotel. I have no need for a raw bird. I leave the shop and think for a moment about throwing it away, but I can’t. This bird just gave its life for me.

  The reputation of Paterson these days is one of crime and unemployment. It is a city where history seems to have sputtered to an end. Writers do not write about Paterson anymore; tourists do not sightsee here. Folks who are fortunate enough to have jobs work for little pay, and the idle remain idle. Paterson reminds me of the immigrant streets I grew up in, where children folded up their innocent childhoods and buried them deep beneath the concrete. But a strength rises out of the cracks in the sidewalks of these immigrant neighborhoods. The Paterson I see today is vibrant, with the din of a hundred languages and the aromas of myriad spices. The rapper Fetty Wap is from Paterson, and you can hear his music blaring from cars as they coast through downtown. He is a hometown hero, one who made it. His mournful tones, like an anthem, ring throughout the patchwork city.

  The restaurants of Paterson are as diverse as the people. Older immigrants, such as the Greeks, once popularized a hot dog they inexplicably called the Texas wiener, which is basically a chili cheese dog. There are a few places, such as Libby’s, that still serve a tasty version of it. The more recent immigrants have their own restaurants now. I could write a story about any of them, but I’m here for the Peruvian experience.

  The city is home to the largest concentration of Peruvian restaurants in the country. Peruvian immigrants started showing up in Paterson for factory jobs in the 1960s, but their numbers were modest. Then, in the 1980s, a militant communist faction called the Shining Path terrorized Peru with a violent campaign that lasted almost twenty years. Many Peruvians died; the ones who didn’t saw their economy dismantled. Peruvian immigration to Paterson skyrocketed. When factory jobs started to dwindle, Peruvian Americans opened shops and restaurants to cater to their growing numbers, creating a cultural replica of their home country. This small section of Paterson is called Little Lima. No one knows exactly how many Peruvians live in Paterson today. The figures fluctuate between fifteen and thirty thousand, depending on whom you ask. There are said to be about sixty Peruvian restaurants in Paterson.

  You could spend a month here and eat every meal at a different restaurant. I have two days, maybe three. If I’m ambitious, I can fit in about five meals a day. It will be impossible for me to taste all the food I want to, so I come up with a strategy. The first thing I do is look online for the restaurant with the best ratings. I find La Tia Delia, a place that has been in Paterson forever and is most recommended by travel sites. I cross that one off my list. I’ll pick the second or third most popular, such as Griselda’s, because it will give me a baseline for the cuisine and I’ll run into fewer tourists there. I try a wide selection of dishes there: ceviche; anticuchos, which are marinated and grilled beef skewers; and lomo saltado, a Peruvian stir-fry of beef in Chinese oyster sauce often served with French fries. The food is tasty but a little underseasoned. I don’t eat everything, just a few bites of each dish, unless I really enjoy it. The rest I wrap up and carry around with me in case I want to retry it after I’ve had another version of the same dish. Also, I hate leaving a plate of uneaten food. The second part of my strategy is to talk to as many locals as I can. Locals usually give me a bunch of recommendations. Lastly, I leave time and room in my belly for wandering around. It is amazing how many times I’ll find a wonderful eatery when I’m not searching for one. One more thing: I look for restaurants that specialize in one dish. This is always a reliable indicator of good food.

  D’Carbon is famous for its Peruvian rotisserie chicken, known as Pollo a la Brasa. You can smell the wood-burning oven from a block away. It is only 10:30 a.m., but the place is already busy. I sit down to an early lunch with my dead chicken as my companion. Everyone gets the same thing here, so ordering is not a tormented process. I ask for a whole chicken, not a half, because I don’t want a chicken that has been precut and drained of its juices. The chicken is marinated in garlic, cumin, paprika, oregano, black pepper, and lime juice. It spins slowly on a spit until the skin gets crispy. The flesh inside turns into a cooked suspension of protein and meat juice that steams with the first bite. There is something profane about eating a cooked chicken while a raw one sits nearby, so I move the bag to the seat across from me. The rotisserie chicken comes with a sauce called aji verde, which is salty, spicy, garlicky, and green. I could drink a gallon of this sauce. Every five minutes, the restaurant’s smoke alarm goes off, blaring out a mind-numbing pattern of rings, but no one seems to notice. They all go about the meal undisturbed. I accompany my chicken with Yucca a la Huancaina, which is fried hunks of yucca root the size of a truck driver’s fingers doused with a yellow cheese sauce. It’s hard to keep myself from eating the whole bird, it is so good, but I have to save my appetite. At the end of my meal, I ask my waitress if I can give her my raw chicken. I explain the circumstances, but she refuses, angrily. She thinks I’m trying to leave a chicken carcass as a tip. I walk out with two chickens under my arm, one cooked, one still raw.

  The first time I had Peruvian food was at Mo-Chica, Ricardo Zarate’s pioneering restaurant in Los Angeles. It’s been closed for years now, but I remember the food vividly. Ricardo made his salchicas, which are pork sausages made with pork blood. His Oxtail Risotto was rich and gelatinous and his Salmon Tiradito with Yuzukoshi was as pretty to look at as it was ethereal to eat. His was refined food with a peasant’s heart. It made me curious about the roots of Peruvian food and about Ricardo’s story. It turns out he grew up in northern Lima with an identity as diverse as Peru itself: Inca and Chinese on his mother’s side and Spanish Basque on his father’s side. If you could build a human in a lab with the most covetous culinary DNA, Ricardo would be it. He fled Lima during the revolution, when he was nineteen. His sister’s apartment had been bombed; he had lost friends to gun violence. He moved to London and worked in the kitchen of the famed Japanese Australian chef Tetsuya Wakuda. When he relocated to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s, he found a city bursting with immigrant culture and poised for a restaurant renaissance. Mo-Chica put Zarate on the map, and he, in turn, put Peruvian food on the stage of a city that was just emerging as a culinary destination.

  Ricardo was a mature chef by the time he opened Mo-Chica, and his food was Peruvian painted with an artist’s brush. He could cook French and Italian. He had already become familiar with Asian flavors in Lima, but he refined them in London. His food was a cultural awakening for most Americans, but for him, it was just the food of his youth. “I took all the favorite foods of my childhood in Lima and then I put my twist on them,” he told me. I wanted to eat the foods of Rica
rdo’s youth before he manipulated them. I wanted to strip away the artist and see the immature sketches of Peruvian food. I could tell Ricardo had a rich well of raw materials from which he derived all this creativity, and I wanted to peek inside that well. I was greedy for it. I could have gone to Peru, but I chose Paterson instead.

  I always feel conflicted by the notion of authenticity. I am here in Paterson for some version of Peruvian food that is authentic, but what does that mean? In many ways, the food of immigrants is not authentic but frozen in time, reflecting the culinary moment when the wave of immigrants left their homes. This is the food of nostalgia. It gives an immigrant population a connection to its home country. Meanwhile, in Peru, the cuisine and the identity of the nation have continued to evolve. Chefs such as Gastón Acurio were not cooking their expressive cuisine when Ricardo fled Lima. Ricardo’s generation of Peruvians took with them the cuisine of that time and relocated it to places such as Paterson. I’m sure there are restaurants in Lima today that still cook in the old style, but the evolution of Lima has altered the culinary landscape forever. Today it is a wealthy, thriving city, and home to a number of Michelin-starred restaurants. In an odd twist of history, the Lima of Ricardo’s youth now lives here in Paterson. So what does that make this food? Authentic? Is it Peruvian with a hyphenated “American” next to it?

  I ask Ricardo for an explanation. He nods and starts to speak slowly but quickly builds up speed as he gestures with his big hands.

  “When people ask me what is Peruvian food, I have the hardest time to explain. I say to them, ‘Peruvian food is a pot that has been simmering for five hundred years.’ The first ingredients were the Incas and the Spaniards. Then we added Africa and Morocco to the pot. Next is Italian, with a little German and French. Then a lot of Chinese. The last ingredient is Japanese. And the pot is still simmering.”

  I love that description. It is a perfect metaphor. One day, I hope we can describe American cuisine in the same wide-open way.

  Just up the street from D’Carbon is a little bright spot called El Rompe y Raja. I meet Eduardo, who is both the chef and the cashier. I tell him I’m an “Eduardo,” too. His ceviche is fresh and unadorned. It comes with a thin slice of roasted sweet potato that is served chilled. He tells me to go back and forth from the tilapia to the sweet potato. I have never had ceviche like this, so perfectly balanced, the acidity of the lime juice tempered by the sweet flesh of the potato. Eduardo’s father had a restaurant in Lima. They left when he was a teenager, and Eduardo spent a decade working in Italian restaurants in New York City. He started this place just last year. I ask him why he would open another Peruvian restaurant in a city that already has so many.

  “’Cause I’m fucking crazy. It’s suicide, I know.”

  “You could have opened in Paramus or Clifton.”

  “I thought about that, but then, I also like it here. This is my home. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

  I ask him what his restaurant’s name—“El Rompe y Raja”—means:

  “It’s music. You know sometimes you go to a club and the music is rocking and you have a great fucking time? That’s a rompe y raja. It’s a slang.”

  The menu reads the same as that in many of the other Peruvian restaurants in Paterson, but the food is different, more ambitious. It has swagger, like Eduardo. I reach into my backpack for a small flask of whiskey I’ve been saving for later. We share a drink; then he pours me a glass of purple corn juice, which is sweeter than the sweetest Kool-Aid. He goes back into the kitchen and makes me a plate of cau cau, chunks of cow intestine with soft-boiled potatoes in green sauce. The intestines melt in my mouth. I drink more purple corn juice and whiskey. This is the best bite of food I’ve had so far.

  “You Chinese?” he asks me. No, I say. “When I first saw you, I thought you were Chinese from Peru.”

  In the nineteenth century, Chinese laborers from Canton arrived in Peru to work the sugar plantations and coastal guano mines, dank caves of sea bird shit that made for valuable fertilizer. They were contract laborers, or “coolies.” Essentially they were legal slaves. Almost all of them were male. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands. When their contracts were paid up, many of them settled with Peruvian women and adopted their wives’ last names. They started to establish restaurants called chifas, the word for Chinese food that arose out of Peruvian ingredients. Calle Capón, Lima’s Chinatown, also known as Barrio Chino de Lima, became one of the Western Hemisphere’s earliest Chinatowns.

  During the wave of immigration to Paterson, a small number of these Chinese Peruvians arrived here and opened Cantonese restaurants serving chifa food. But their chifa cuisine has always been overshadowed by the Chinese American experience, which began with early settlers coming to California from Guangzhou during the Gold Rush. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, essentially closing America’s doors to Chinese immigration. By 1902, Chinese immigration to the United States was made permanently illegal, and remained so until the 1940s. What makes all this interesting from a culinary standpoint is that what most Americans knew about Chinese food came from this small region of Guangzhou, which Americans called Canton. Even today, the idea of Chinese American food is still woefully limited to a miscalculated Cantonese cuisine. The chifa cuisine, when it came to America, was limited to the pantry that was accessible here, which did not include many Peruvian ingredients. So chifa cooks were forced to use the ingredients of the American Chinese pantry. As a result, there is little to distinguish the chifa restaurant from the countless Chinese American restaurants that likewise serve a Cantonese-inflected menu. The two restaurants seem at first almost identical, but there are subtle differences. If all this sounds complicated, well, it is.

  For chifa, Eduardo tells me to go to a place called Eat in Happy Restaurant, which I jot down in my notebook as the best name for a restaurant I’ve ever heard. It is good chifa, he tells me.

  I put my dead chicken and my other leftovers on the chair next to me. It is starting to give off a tepid odor. The place is painted dark and the tables are spaced out for maximum seating. The walls are spare to the point of being unwelcoming. The menu, aside from a small section called “Platos Especiales,” reads like any other Chinese American menu. I order Kam Lou Wantan, which is just sweet-and-sour pork with wontons. Chi Jau Kay is chicken stir-fry with oyster sauce. General Tso Pollo is, well, you know. The one dish that seems different is the restaurant’s lomo saltado, a Peruvian national favorite on every menu in Paterson. It consists of thick strips of beef sautéed with onion, fresh tomatoes, and scallions, and tossed with French fries in a light sweet-and-sour oyster sauce. The meat is dark and delicious, and the fries get soggy in a good way. I’m full, but I can’t stop eating. The flavor is salty and sweet-and-sour and brutally honest. It is better than the version I tried at Griselda’s.

  The persistence of this version of Chinese food presents a conundrum. It seems identical to many Chinese American restaurants. Can chifa even exist in America if, by its very definition, it is the hybrid of China and Peru? I order a dish called Chaufa, which is the same fried rice I’ve eaten a thousand times. I look out the window of Eat in Happy Restaurant and see, just a block away, a Chinese American restaurant that I am sure is serving the same fried rice—except it is also not the same. According to Leibniz’s law on the identity of indiscernibles, if they were actually the same, I would not recognize them as being distinct. But I do. The two dishes might use the same ingredients, but by arriving in Paterson through two distinct paths, they are ontologically separate. Both started in Guangzhou and arrived in Paterson, but before they arrived in America, they evolved in two separate cultures. As Immanuel Kant would say, even if two things are the same, if they are at two different places at the same time, they are numerically different. Because of this, I can taste a difference.

  At China Chilcano, in Washington, D.C., José Andrés makes a version of lomo saltado that is much bet
ter than what I’m eating at Eat in Happy Restaurant—well, maybe not better, but more complex, more creative, and more focused. It is not “authentic,” but neither is what I’m eating here, and neither is what is served in Lima. This is what I find so infuriating about the impulse to classify food as authentic. It implies that there is a right and a wrong. It implies that tradition is static and that there can be no evolution. It implies that a culture can stand still. There is nothing about this place in Paterson, New Jersey, with its paint chipping off the walls, that resembles José’s stunning restaurant in Penn Quarter in D.C., and yet they are connected. I’m happy to be here in this working-class restaurant eating this proletarian version of lomo saltado. If José is taking this dish to its highest potential, then this is where it starts. I clean my plate. I can feel the tremble-causing MSG creeping into my bloodstream. I have a love-hate relationship with MSG. I love what it does to my mouth, not so much my nervous system.

  I’m so full that my eyelids start to flutter. I cannot eat any more today. I get in a cab because it hurts to walk. I’m carrying bags of food that are starting to give off a smell that is unrecognizable and nauseating. I don’t have a destination. I ask the driver to take me through a few neighborhoods; I’m about to fall asleep. Just then, I notice an awning for a bakery that reads “Los Immortales” in a font that is part German Gothic, part Mexican gang. I ask the cabbie to stop. I almost ask him if he wants my chicken, but I have grown attached to it now.