So i finally found the time to go try the much awaited Pisco y Nazca Gastropub, I had this restaurant bookmarked even before they were going to open their doors to the public.
After reading most of the yelpers reviews I was super excited to go try out all the fabulous dishes they have featured on their menu. I went to have lunch last Sunday around 2pm, located in the Shops at "Town and Country" parking is convenient and accessible, the restaurant is spacious, nicely decorated and has a good vibe, as soon as we arrived we were greeted and sited right away by the nice and bubbly hostess. Our waiter was helpful and on point throughout our whole visit, service was excellent. SO it goes like this..im sorry to say it but...If I could, I would rate this Place with a 3.5 stars, mostly because of the service provided. But I'm starting to think either I'm getting too picky...or what continues to happen to me is that I'm starting to get convinced that Kendall residents, due to the lack of fancy/new/hip/modern restaurants, they would eat, like and get delighted with whatever kind of food a new restaurant in town would serve on their plates, getting fooled by the nice decoration/ambiance and the exotic dishes presentation, or is it that they are simply like I would say in Spanish "come malo"/ bad eaters?.
Lets start with the food:
BUTICHINO: my favorite out of everything I ordered. A twist to the traditional Chinese steamed pork belly buns, although the buns are fried, not steamed, minced pork, pickled salsa and hoisin mayo. The pork was tasty and the buns crispy and soft on the inside. They were very good.
PLANCHA PULPO: Good idea, good ingredients, but very badly executed, one of the worst octopus i've eaten. The octopus is prepared with the skin on to give it a nicer look and so it seems a bigger piece...but at the end when you eat it you need to take all the skin out to get to the meat, if not you will end up having in your mouth a piece of chewy elastic octopus skin with a kind of soft meat center. If Octopus is not well prepared it gets like rubber and its not suppose to be this way, a well prepared octopus is tender and tasty, I would recommend them to skip the visual effects and take that awful skin out. I couldn't enjoy this dish at all.
RAVIOLES DE PEPIAN: Good idea, poorly excecuted... Ravioli's where good but shy on the ingredients, I could barely taste the pepian stuffin, it only had a thin film inside, and the sauce on top didn't cover the whole raviolis so I ended up chewing on naked parts of the pasta withouth anything on them. If they would fill up those raviolis insides with a great portion of the pepian stuffin and garnish them with more sauce, the experience would be much different, i barely could taste what it had inside so I didn't even really know what it was until I went back to the menu to read the ingredients.
CHAUFA: Fresh ingredients, but yet again very poorly executed, the rice grains were not cooked the enough time kind of hard for my taste and it was soaked with some kind of sauce that didn't impregnate, leaving the rice wet and soupy mostly at the bottom of the plate.
ROCOTO CEVICHE: First of all it was the first dish we ordered and it was suppose to come as a starter but it was the last thing we ate due to a problem in the kitchen, apparently they forgot and the manager had to come over and apologize. Apart from that I'm sorry to say this but it was the worst Ceviche i've eaten in my life. The ceviche is made with flounder, fried calamari, rocoto leche de tigre, cancha and sweet potato; well the ingredients to me don't work out well together, the rocoto pepper sauce combined with the purple onions and the cilantro taste exactly like adobo, AWFUL!, the fried calamari, the panko mixed with the leche de trigre sauce makes a bad reaction and it makes the sauce grainy and dense, also the little cubes of sweet potato don't add any good flavor to it either, not to mention the little lemon juice it had, and the fish was cut in huge pieces that made it not to be nicely marinated. I did not like it at all.
Overall experience due to the great service was good, the food was not, maybe the cooks need a little more training, and prices are not cheap, so when I'm paying premium $ premium is what I expect. I will give it a second try latter on to see how it goes. read more