Mango

I’m at the National No-Till Conference in St. Louis. 3 intense days of speakers, classrooms, and roundtables on no-till farming. They do give us breaks for supper though. While being away from home and eating by yourself isn’t that much fun, I still try to seek out interesting places to eat. Tonight in downtown St. Louis I found a winner at the Peruvian restaurant Mango

I’d never been to a Peruvian restaurant, so it caught my eye was I looking through listings of restaurants in downtown St. Louis. I know next to nothing about Peru or what they eat, so I had no idea what I might be getting into.

When you’re seated they serve you a little dish of plantain crisps with a cilantro, garlic, aji chile, and olive oil dip. I don’t like cooked bananas, but those plantain crisps were incredible. Give me a bag of those and I would eat them until I was sick.

I started out with a Papa Rellena which is a whole potato stuffed with beef and onions, then crispy fried. The potato is golden and crisp outside and floury and light inside. They served it with a pickled onion salsa that was a nice complement.

My main course was grouper served on a tacu-tacu cake (which is beans and rice). It was garnished with red, yellow, and green pepper strips, and crispy thin noodles. And it had an aji pepper based sauce that gave it just a nice peppery bite. It was all perfectly executed and I seriously wanted to lick the bowl to get all of that sauce.

No point in stopping now, for dessert I had Pionono which is sponge cake rolled around dulce de leche (caramel sauce), dusted with powdered sugar and drizzled with caramel and raspberry sauce. My server asked me if I wanted ice cream with it, but I showed one tiny bit of restraint in the evening and passed on the ice cream. The dessert was delicious. The sponge cake was light and airy and kept the dish pleasantly light.

If the outrageously delicious food wasn’t enough, the service was flawless (although my server didn’t look old enough to be out after dark by himself). And the restaurant was beautifully decorated in an über-cool renovated warehouse space. Even better, for downtown in a major city it wasn’t that pricey. I was out of there for less than 40 bucks for appetizer, dinner, and dessert.

One of the tastiest and most well-executed meals I’ve ever had.