Wednesday, Meal Ticket and Foobooz were lucky enough to sample a couple new dishes from Jose Garces’ forthcoming Chifa. Chifa will be Garces’ Peruvian and Cantonese restaurant at 707 Chestnut Street. Our favorite bite and Meal Ticket’s as well, were these delicious scallion pancakes.
A bite-size fried scallion pancake was crowned with impossibly tender sous vide pork cheeks, five-spice peanuts and pickled scallions. The Meal Ticket crew tried not to take a second pancake when the servers passed by with more tempting trays, and failed miserably.
We once described our reaction to Amada’s crab stuffed peppers as doing a Snoopy dance. Well these scallion pancakes were a knee buckling, toe curling experience that we can’t wait to experience again.
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month Google invited Chef Jose Garces to their New York office to discuss his new book, Latin Evolution and his perspective on just about everything from the Philadelphia restaurant market, returning to New York, being on Iron Chef, even marriage advice as well as some juicy tidbits on Chifa and his whiskey bar.
Usually the week before a big holiday is D-E-A-D, dead, dead, dead. But that isn’t the case this week as this bombshell just landed.
Jose Garces (Amada, Tinto, Distrito) is taking over the departed 707 on Chestnut Street and is opening an Asian and Latin-style restaurant with an emphasis on ceviche that will be named Chifa.
According to the always reliable Wikipedia, chifa is defined as:
Chifa is the name given to an establishment in Peru in which Peruvian-Cantonese cuisine is served. The name chifa comes from a Spanish adoption of the Mandarin words chi fan (吃飯), which mean “to dine”. The chifa is especially common in Lima’s Chinatown (barrio chino), but can be found anywhere in Peru with a significant ethnically Chinese population.
[Amazon.com]
