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Mancora Peruvian Cuisine

Joanna Savill

Peru's national dish ... ceviche clasico.
Peru's national dish ... ceviche clasico.Steven Siewert

South American

Peruvians love potatoes. And they have lots of them - 5000 varieties or so - with many ways of serving them. Peru is also home to chillies - thousands of them, too, including a juicy but potent yellow chilli, and a squat and rather feisty fellow known as rocoto. Then there's a fierce grappa-like liquor called pisco and another national dish - ceviche - in which raw fish is doused with a fresh lime-onion-and-chilli-based marinade known, rather exotically, as leche de tigre, or tiger's milk.

These are things you probably need to know if you're heading to this blindingly white-walled dining room on a dark part of Addison Road. Named after a seaside town in northern Peru, Mancora is squeaky-new, with multi-coloured Peruvian paintings on the wall and a bouncy, up-tempo soundtrack of Latin classics. (If you're not a fan of Gypsy Kings, Guantanamera and Besame Mucho, think about going elsewhere.)

Keeping to the under-$30 budget may be tricky when raw-fish entrees such as ceviche and tiradito (sliced fish rather than ceviche chunks) start at $20. But they're ideal to share and, to paraphrase writer Alexander McCall Smith, traditionally portioned - read, large serves. The ceviche is excellent: fresh-as fish pieces, a good drenching of citrusy tiger's milk, finely sliced spanish onion, coriander and the traditional contrasts of sweet potato, roasted corn and corn kernels.

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Light and bright ... Mancora Peruvian Restaurant.
Light and bright ... Mancora Peruvian Restaurant.Fiona Morris

To balance the ceviche, you might opt for a potato dish. Best perhaps is a crema (cream) item - boiled potato slices drizzled with Peruvian sauces in a lovely range of orange, cream and green. These include ocopa (with feta and a musty herb called huacatay), huancaina (with yellow chillies) and a mayo-like version. The huancaina packs a decent punch.

There's a series of seafood rice dishes for the main course. Or perhaps, to keep on budget, a stuffed potato. Alternatively, there's the old Lima favourite called lomo saltado, in the ''chifa'' or Chinese-Peruvian tradition. It's a simple soy-laced stir-fry of beef strips served on hand-cut chips (more spuds) and a hillock of rice. Plain but good.

Mancora is barely two months old and the kitchen can be a little slow, the prices a tad ambitious for the area (our pisco sour cocktails were $15 each and, while properly executed, not traditionally portioned) and they don't take credit cards.

But it's a fun place for some bright new flavours. And at least a dozen interesting ways with potatoes.

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Do … have a Peruvian Tres Cruces (Three Crosses) beer. Great with potatoes.

Don't … forget to bring cash.

Dish … ceviche. As it should be done.

Vibe … whitewashed modern with folksy overtones.

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