Prateek S.
Yelp
Mouth orgy.
The end.
Not really. I like to make my Yelp reviews somewhat informative but the first two words sum it up perfectly. Plus I would like to relive one of the best nights of my life. It's in the top three, in fact. It was: Wedding night, adult bris, and Machu Chicken.
All three have a common thread running through them. Give up? They all helped me move onto the next stage of my life.
With the wedding night, that's obvious. New wife, new life.
Adult bris . . . Well, if you've ever surfaced after a dive, you'll get the idea.
And with Machu Chicken, it elevated my sense of taste to a new height. Experiencing a completely new flavor profile is a rare and exhilarating experience. It's like the sensei presenting you the different colored belt. I now have a wider palette of experiences to draw from when I come up with dishes for weekday dinners.
In other words, it was literally next level. Mouth orgy. Tonguebang!
And the miracle of it is that they did it with a simple roasted chicken. This restaurant specializes in chicken and is the sister restaurant of the more traditional Machu Picchu just around the corner. There's a good reason for this: The chicken IS special.
Machu's chicken is charcoal-cooked and it's seasoned with a bafflingly good rub. I have never tasted anything like it. On the one hand, there was the irreplaceable smokiness of the charcoal. On the other hand, there was a wisp of sweetness and a citrusy touch.
I'm sorry I can't get more descriptive but that might be a good thing because it might encourage you to experience it for yourself. By the way, the white meat was succulent as well, which suggests that it was brined.
With the chicken, I got roasted potatoes and a side salad.
The roasted potatoes were almost perfect. They had crisp exteriors and interiors that were soft, but not so soft that they collapsed under the weight of one fork tine. Potatoes are as natural a side dish to roast chicken as they are to steak. They're like the enabling husband on 'My 600-lb. Life'; they boost the main attraction's meatiness.
The chicken was the first unique flavor profile I tasted. The second, characteristically Peruvian, flavor profile was the pair of dipping sauces. The two most well-known sauces are aji verde and aji amarillo. This literally translates to green chile and yellow chile and the colors of the salsas will reflect this.
The green chile sauce can be made with any green ingredient that you fancy. Machu makes theirs with jalapeños making it the hotter sauce of the two. It's got a pleasing bite that finishes really well on the smoky chicken. It's actually not unlike your typical South American girl: Elegant and alluring but she'll kick you in the nuts if you're not careful.
I say elegant because both salsas are thickened and smoothed out with some kind of dairy product. Traditional recipes call for cream, but some people use mayonnaise. It doesn't matter. The smoothness tames the bite of the peppers very well.
The aji amarillo pepper is the pride of Peru. They've popularized the pepper and the famous paste it's made out of. If South America was governed by chile peppers and I had to appoint a Secretary of State to represent the region, I'd appoint aji amarillo.
It's the perfect chile.
It's tangy, it's got a very manageable heat level (further tamed by the dairy product), and it has a bright color, much like the colors that Peruvians like to adorn their buildings and bodies with to keep the mood festive. It speaks to the best qualities of the region's fruity chiles.
I went back and forth between green and yellow, going back as much for the color combination as the flavor combination. Whoever designed the 'Sesame Street' sign must have had these salsas the night before. I finished my chicken and it took all of four seconds for the three of us to decide that we wanted dessert.
It took us even less time to settle on the tres leches cake.
If South Americans had stopped innovating at salsas and chicken, they would have contributed enough to the world. But they decided to go a step further and combine sweetened, condensed milk with a luscious sponge cake.
I think everyone knows what tres leches cake is. If not, everyone knows what Wikipedia is. Look it up. I think it's enough to say that it was fantastic. The ingredients in tres leches cake would lead you to believe that it's going to be very sweet.
It wasn't. It was just sweet enough. Like Brick Top in Guy Ritchie's 'Snatch.'
This too is a dish that defies articulation. In fact, we're about to come full-circle: The emotions I experienced during my top three life events cannot be conveyed. You'd have had to witness my facial expressions. (Try describing the look on someone's face when the mohel is walking towards him).
Let that be you at Machu. Minus the wiener-chopping. Let the flavors and the heat register at their own pace and let them make you smile.
