I haven’t seen the New Yorker review yet, but at nyc chifa spots, the overall style of cuisine the restaurant serves is chifa, but not all the individual dishes are fusion-- Peruvian and Chinese diaspora dishes are served side by side, along with the mash-ups. The rotisserie chicken is usually a menu fixture.
Some previous chifa discussions and articles:
in the middle of the article it states:
Helen, Help Me!
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from siestema’s review of johnny’s, admitedly a little weak:
“The rotisserie Peruvian chickens are another dish that shows Chinese influences, but not outrightly. The standard recipe for the marinade includes garlic powder, cumin, vinegar, paprika, and white wine, which sounds very Spanish. But I have also heard that soy sauce is a predominant ingredient.”
I’ve posted at least a couple of times about flor de mayo, one of our favorite restaurants on the uws, while I consider their chicken firmly on the peruvian side of the menu, ordering it with mixed fried rice does feel at least a little chifa-ish.
best,
Let me ask some Peruvian-American friends. They all love chifa, which I don’t entirely get. The chifa place near my house (now closed after decades in business) that was beloved by the local Peruvian-American community just seemed like an unusually greasy version of Chinese-diaspora cuisine.
But let me ask them whether they view pollo a la brasa as chifa. I’d be surprised if they do, but I’ve been surprised many times about stuff I was certain about.
But when you have these kinds of cross cultural restaurants, it does not follow that all the dishes are fusion cooking. There is no purity in this world. Chinese cooks travel the world and add the local cuisines to their repertoire, and their flavors and style enhancements to some of the dishes. All the cuban/puerto rican/dominican comido china criollo restaurants in NY we have eaten in over the years have some dishes that are pretty much hispanic (fried plantains and the weekend pernil with yuca in garlic sauce come to mind ) while the moro rice that typically accompanies it may well be a contribution of the hispanic cooks and they surely enhance preparations of ropa vieja with chinese stir frying techniques and ingredients and offer noodle soups with a chinese tilt.. I guess my point is that a restaurant can call itself chifa or criollo china even if each and every dish does not use fusion techniques. The restaurant above all wants to make money by giving the customers the foods they crave.
guess you had already covered the necessary ground before i raised my head out of the sand to reply.
You all are over-complicating this.
I made a simple statement. The New Yorker’s critic says pollo a la brasa is chifa; that’s incorrect.
I’ve now heard back from three people who are extremely familiar with Lima’s restaurants (and Peruvian restaurants in the US) and they unanimously say, in so many words, “Of course, pollo a la brasa is not chifa. They are two different things.”
Of course, a restaurant that calls itself chifa can have some non-chifa dishes. But that’s not what the New Yorker said. It would have been accurate if the review had read:
“Johnny’s, a tidy new restaurant in East Williamsburg that opened in July, specializes in chifa , a Peruvian-Cantonese fusion that’s one of the world’s great comfort cuisines: dumplings, stir fries, and fried rice, as well as the charcoal-kissed rotisserie chicken known as pollo a la brasa , and endless amounts of aji verde , a spicy, cilantro-laden green-chile sauce." All of it, chifa and pollo la brasa, is hearty, punchy, and filling.”
I was in no way criticizing Johnny’s, which does not call itself a “chifa” restaurant. It has chifa and non-chifa items on its menu, which includes a smashburger and spare ribs.
look at their instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DPO8wHND97y/?hl=en&img_index=1
I think its really all about who the cooks are. Whether a particular dish is fusiony is beside the point.
Yes, that Instagram is accurate. It distinguishes between chifa and polla a la brasa (as does the restaurant).
i don’t think anyone here has claimed pollo la brasa is chifa and I’m sure we all understand your point about the review.
GOLDEN PALACE GOURMET
We discussed and looked at a few Dongbei places, and settled on this partly because @ike had good memories of it from along time ago, partly because @JenKalb had shared a recent Sietsema shout-out, partly because I found their vegetable section intriguing (what are tea plant mushrooms ad why have I never eaten them?) and partly because we were starving by the time we were in the vicinity 
Complimentary snacks of shredded potato salad / pickle and shredded spicy cabbage salad / pickle.
The server helped us narrow down some choices from the menu — cumin lamb, dry stir fried tea plant mushrooms, and pork pancakes ended up on the table. We stopped there because we thought we would continue to graze elsewhere, but then we couldn’t because we were stuffed – so we should just have ordered another dish anyway 
. (The tables around us with less people had 2-3 dishes per head, so they must be taking home leftovers, because the portions were generous.)
.
Glad you went there and sorry I couldn’t join you. From the time that this place opened (well over 10 years ago now), it was a regular haunt of many of us from Chowhound (& other “normal” people we dragged along: erica, for one, had regular dinners there that I remember joining). I think the owners cooked at the other hangout, Fu Run, before striking out on their own. At any rate, I think I was there well over 20 times and enjoyed every one of those meals. As its now been several years since I’ve been there, I’d love to return with a group if any of you want to sample more of the menu.
It was a very good meal, so glad we made it. The tea tree mushrooms (these were dry fried, they had other dishes using them) were killer - the combination of crunchy mushroom grease and the ma la reminded me of great snack food. I thought both the cumin lamb and the pork filled bread were delicious too but that finished us!
Can’t get those mushrooms out of my head! I realized while we were snacking on them that the stems were chewy, the caps were crisp, and the caps were intensely mushrooms while the stems had more tingle and spice.
I wonder if I can find the mushrooms themselves in one of the markets.
And on further reflection I think they might be the brown beech mushrooms that are separated and fried up to look like that 
The dongbei place near the station is (surprisingly?) extremely highly reviewed relative to this one, but I’d like to explore more dongbei for certain.
@Ike was speculating as to whether the old place he had been to multiple times was under different ownership than the current one, as the name may have been slightly different (Golden Palace vs Golden Palace Gourmet).
Yesterday i wondered out loud whether this was the place you mentioned, but thought you were here recently, maybe post-open? Or was that another db place?
There used to be a local place that offered the addition of fried eggplant onto their Italian hero (place was re-titled as disco deli as it was always blasting forth in the place). It made for a very good addition and I’m surprised more places don’t have it listed as an add-on. It really does give it another texture/taste on a good sub.
@Ike was speculating as to whether the old place he had been to multiple times was under different ownership than the current one, as the name may have been slightly different (Golden Palace vs Golden Palace Gourmet).
The Dongbei place near the station is (surprisingly?) highly reviewed relative to this one.
(I’m willing to believe that asking the server’s help to finalize our choices instead of doing it ourselves had an impact on our very positive experience too.)
What is the Dongbei place near the station?
OMG, that writing was great.
