D. Solomon

Mo-Chica's kitchen

Ricardo Zarate wants you to know something before checking out his new Mo-Chica. Slated to open Wednesday, May 30, it replaces an earlier version of the same name that closed yesterday. "Peru. It's in South America," says Zarate, mock-serious. "Its limits are Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia and Chile." He recalls how one guest had thought Peru bordered Spain. "The point is, I'm trying to introduce my country through my food."

Mo-Chica, a few doors from Bottega Louie in downtown L.A., is poised to become an excellent ambassador. Zarate describes the menu as "comfort food," with cooked foods in large portions -- think stews -- rather than tiny tapas of, say, raw fish, as at his other restaurant, Picca. And the visual style -- red walls, gold accents, a graffiti mural -- is vibrant and fun. "We want to introduce Peruvian food, so we need to be trendy, no?" says Zarate.

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Kevin Scanlon

Ricardo Zarate

This Thursday probably won't be your last chance to try chef Ricardo Zarate's renditions of Peruvian staples such as aji de gallina or lomo saltado. But it could be your final opportunity to eat them at Mercado la Paloma -- the colorful warehouse-turned-marketplace just south of downtown. Zarate has just announced he'll close Mo-chica on May 24. The space "will become an incubator for Ricardo's future concepts," says a press release. Just days later, on May 30, Zarate will debut a new version of Mo-Chica downtown.

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Anne Fishbein

Chicken on the rotisserie at Takatis

If you wanted to rank L.A. courthouses by approximate distances to good food -- places to console your stomach before or after, say, dealing with a moving violation or outstanding warrant -- the monolithic Superior Court building in Van Nuys would easily rank near the top. Where else could a jury duty-sanctioned lunch include options like avocado-smeared cemitas, tamales criollos, roasted hunks of lechon asado or a sinus-clearing portion of bun bo hue?

It was during a post-court day spent driving along Van Nuys Boulevard that the bold Ruscha-esque sign for Takatis Pollo a la Brasa first came into view, flanked by an off-brand mini-mall and a swap meet filled with replica Chivas jerseys fluttering in the wind.

Pollos a la brasa joints are not lacking in this neck of the woods; Takatis isn't even the only one on the block. You can sniff out the good ones by the plumes of rotisserie smoke, or by the lines of overall-wearing mechanics picking up roasted chicken and fries on their lunch break. You can get a reliably crisp-skinned bird at Lola's, just down the street, or at Nazca nearby, a pan flute-soundtracked spot better known for its lomo saltado.

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Flickr/superiphi

Did cavemen sit around the fire stuffing their hairy faces with popcorn? After analyzing recently unearthed ancient corncobs, researchers say people in what's now Peru were eating popcorn 2,000 years earlier than previously thought -- up to 6,700 years ago, National Geographic reports.

Previously, evidence of corn as food before about 5,000 years ago had come from only microscopic remains that didn't reveal exactly what kind of corn was being eaten. Using radiocarbon dating and other tests to examine the newfound corncobs -- along with husks, tassels and stalks -- scientists determined that the oldest cobs were popcorn. The really, really stale corn remains were unearthed at the Paredones and Huaca Prieta archeological sites on Peru's northern coast.

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B. Hansen

Osaka entrance

Osaka, the new Japanese-Peruvian place in Hollywood, has the scariest entrance. It's very dark, and you have to cross over stepping stones in a pool of rippling black water. I subconsciously felt drawn to fall, and all the time I was in there, I worried about how I would get out -- dry.

Osaka is part of a chain founded in Peru. The look was designed by Kristopher Keith of SpaceCraft (probably a good swimmer).

There are nice touches inside, like an overhead rope motif inspired by the ropes of Peruvian fishing boats. The food is Peruvian-Asian fusion, predominantly Japanese, but also with touches of Thai and other cuisines.

It's a small plates place with the expected Peruvian ceviche, tiraditos, anticuchos and cute miniature causitas. But also fish in a banana leaf with anticucho sauce and coconut reduction, miso-truffled American Kobe skirt steak with Peruvian potatoes, Parmesan scallops, grilled octopus with sweet miso paste and duck confit with miso oranges and caramelized onions.

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D. Solomon

Chimú blackboard, drawn by Nicholas Knudson.

A chalkboard drawing of a wild-eyed creature pedaling away on a bicycle greeted Chimú visitors on Sunday, along with the word "FAREWELL."

Chimú has closed its doors, or rather, its take-out windows, which served up steaming plates of chancho, lomo saltado, pollo a la brasa and seco de cordero.

On Saturday, Chimú's last day, chef Mario Alberto was telling customers, "It's time to move on," accented with a good-natured shrug. "I wish we could have stayed open longer, seen it grow, but I also look at it as moving forward," he tells us.

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D. Gonzalez

Dive into the deep: Cioppino at Colori Kitchen

If there's such a thing as a seasonal protein, during summer, seafood is it. After all, it's during summer that we are most aware that we live in a coastal region. Hand in hand with that urge to play along the shore, comes that desire to taste what comes from the deep.

When it comes to seafood, sushi comes to mind and so does the fried stuff. But cooked seafood dishes rarely make into the top choices of summer foods, and it's not just because they're served warm. Mostly it's because they're notorious for containing overcooked seafood. Dry fish, rubbery mollusks, mushy crustaceans. This summer, we decided to take some chances with cooked seafood dishes and found ourselves happily rewarded.

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F. Friesema

Jonagold apples

If you look at restaurants as movies, and sometimes it's hard not to, Picca is one of those places whose trailers seem to have been running forever. There's Mo-Chica, of course, where Ricardo Zarate first came up with his concept of modern Peruvian food, and his guest-chef gigs, and his endless pop-ups at Test Kitchen -- located, conveniently enough, below the space that eventually became Picca. Zarate became a Food + Wine best new chef at a point in his career when most Angelenos weren't quite sure who he was. And then Picca opened, almost without notice, a handsome, airy room up a flight of stairs from Pico, with a glassed-in kitchen and supergraphics where you might expect the moody black-and-white photographs of dancing Quechuas to be.

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Picca, Ricardo Zarate's west LA version of a Latin American cantina, opens June 25th. Where Mo-Chica is classic Peruvian food, Picca is decidedly modern, driven by small plates with a heavy Japanese influence. The menu is split into five sections, weighted toward causas shaped like sushi nigiri and ceviches presented as sashimi, along with a robust selection of innovative robata: grilled scallops topped with an aji amarillo aïoli so light it's almost foam and chewy chicken gizzards squirted with bright green jalapeno aïoli.

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Kevin Scanlon

Ricardo Zarate

Ricardo Zarate's path has been a little more circuitous even than most chefs', a peripatetic lot in general. His life in the kitchen began in his native Lima, Peru, where as a teenager he cooked banquets for hundreds and learned from a friend's mother how to make sushi. Then from culinary school in Peru to a dozen years in London sushi restaurants and a stint working for Gordon Ramsay, of all people. And thus to Los Angeles and a colorful mercado just south of downtown, where Zarate opened his tiny cevicheria Mo-Chica in 2009.

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