New Haven – A familiar New Haven dining face is about to dine on Peruvian food, which has been swinging around the edges in this part of Connecticut for many years, downtown where it can be seen and appreciated by all in the soon-to-open Chacra Peruvian Kitchen A pisco bar.
For years, Chakra’s main owner, Walter Vera, was the general manager of Pacifico, the most prestigious Latin American fusion restaurant two blocks from College and Crown. Previously he worked in Barcelona at Stamford and a number of other Connecticut restaurants – including, for many years, Mory’s on York Street.
Now Vera, a native of Cuenca, Ecuador who these days lives in East Haven, is a week or two away from opening Chacra, a fine Peruvian restaurant and pisco bar, at 152 Temple St. , the former site of Temple Grill. It is directly across the street from the Omni New Haven Hotel in Yale, with a frontage in the Temple Street courtyard.
Why would an Ecuadorean seek to open a Peruvian restaurant and bar in downtown New Haven?
“I really love Peruvian food,” said Vera, who came to the US years ago at the age of 17, which Elite Traveler.com ranks among the “best in the world.”
“What I like about Peruvian cuisine is that it has a mix” including Peruvian, Japanese, and other global influences, Vera said. Other influences include Chinese and Italian.
“It looks like New Haven needs something like that,” he said one day, sitting in the almost-finished dining area while the craftsman worked in the kitchen.
Vera, still in the middle of various inspections, can’t say exactly when Chacra will open. “The only thing I can say is that we are really close,” he said.
Chakra will center around the spiced Peruvian roast chicken—and a range of drinks made with different types of Peruvian pisco, going beyond the traditional Pisco Sour to include piscos flavored with passionfruit, blackberry, hibiscus and prickly pear, among others, Vera said.
Vera said he expects Chacra to stock the largest selection of pisco in the state — as well as a range of tequila and mazcal, and Peruvian beers like Cristal and Cusqueña.
He will also offer refreshing non-alcoholic drinks like chicha morada, made with Peruvian purple corn, fresh orange and lemon juice, coconut puree and a touch of vanilla, he said.
It will also feature many ceviche and other Peruvian classics, including salted loin – made in this case with steak – shrimp stew and anticochos (a Peruvian shish kebab made with beef hearts), papa (potato) and cassava la huancaina (in Slightly spicy huancayo style cheese sauce), queso limonas, arroz chufa (Peruvian style fried rice), jelly and parihuela.
Vera said that Chakra’s chef, Angel Valderrama, is from Lima, the capital of Peru, even though most of the restaurants he worked for in Connecticut weren’t Peruvian.
“For me, it’s so important,” Vera said, “to have a fun combination of good food, drinks, and ambiance – and the drinks should be good!” “
“All these little details make people feel welcome,” he said.
Chacra won’t be the first Peruvian restaurant in Greater New Haven, which is already home to La Molienda at 113 Grand Ave. in Fair Haven, and the Sabor Peru at 56 Main St. Annex near the East Haven line, and El Rincon Peruano at 469 Campbell Ave in West Haven.
But it will be the first in the heart of downtown (although another, C’Viche 181, has tried it for a few years on Orange Street.)
He realizes that because it’s a downtown restaurant and watering hole, “most of the customers here won’t be Peruvians. There will be Peruvians too. But most of them will be Americans.”
At one point, the conversation is interrupted by a team of workers at a security company working to integrate Chacra’s fire alarms and security alarms into the system of the larger apartment building in which it is located.
The conversation was repeatedly interrupted by Vera’s 4-year-old daughter, Valentina, who came to work with her father and seemed not at all content to sit down and watch “Clifford the Big Red Dog” on one of Chacra’s TV sets.
Chacra’s decor includes a large pillar in the center that was there when Temple Grill was but has been remodeled to look like a tree. It also features two large painted wall celebs, one for a Peruvian village in the mountains outside Cusco and one for a woman who works as a textile weaver. Both were painted by Vera’s brother-in-law, Pablo Nogra, an Ecuadorean artist.
mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com