Villa Wellington

4701 rue Wellington

Verdun, QC

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7/10

Peruvian

When I wasn’t playing music in Lima last May, I was hunting down food. I tried ceviche (raw fish marinated in lime juice and salt with onions and chili pepper, pescado surdado (steamed fish in a sort of spicy, soupy pepper sauce), causa (layered potato and seafood salad), and as much aji chili pepper as I could stuff into me. I went to markets, asked people about cooking techniques and ingredients, went to a food museum, and basically stumbled my way through conversations with anyone who could tell me anything about Peruvian gastronomy.

So when I got back to Montreal I wanted to see what the Peruvian community was like here, and I went in search of food. Superficial judgment of the community, I know, but it was something I could directly compare with my experiences in Peru. Turns out there’s a small clump of Peruvian restaurants up in the Beaubien-Petite-Patrie-Rosemont area, and then there’s one place down in Verdun. So I headed to Verdun, to a restaurant called Villa Wellington.

The meal started off well with the same white rolls and butter I grew accustomed to in Lima. European influence. The kind of roll that is certainly not baguette – you tear out clumps of fluffy, how dough inside and add a dab of butter that melts quickly into the bun. This is the kind of place that gives you butter packets on the table, but I didn’t come here for the butter. And the bun was delicious, and completely ant-free, unlike one morning at breakfast at my hotel! Seems that insects in Lima like to commit suicide by crawling into the rising dough when the bakers aren’t looking. Not at Villa Wellington. Not that they bake the rolls there. Not that my hotel in Lima did either.

I wanted ceviche, but seafood in Montreal is generally pretty not good, and at a restaurant known for its huge portions and low prices and butter packets you know you’re not getting the best fish ever. Still, the restaurant was exactly what I wanted, and the mussels, squid, and un-named white-fleshed fish in a sort of hot and sour soup with a few vegetables was plenty satisfying. I could have stopped there, it was so big. The restaurant is sort of known for this dish, which is a Peruvian specialty. It’s a very share-able pot packed full of mussels – slightly thickened with flour – and made better with chili paste. Except it should be amarillo (yellow) chili paste or rocoto (red), not jalapeno. Jalapeno is bitter, and nowhere in Peru served jalapeno pepper paste that I saw. I didn’t even see any jalapenos in Lima. So it added a bit of heat, but no flavour (the jalapenos are the globs of green in the photo below).

Now that I was stuffed, it was time for the main course. Mmm…inexpensive gluttony. Fortunately, this is pretty authentic, too. Lima is famous for cheap food in huge portions, and Villa Wellington does a good job recreating that experience. The menu is huge – everything from “chifa” (Chinese food – mostly fried rice, meat strips stir-fried with soy sauce and piles and piles of rice (actually, everything comes with rice), to grilled meats with rice and potatoes and in skewer-form, chicken and hot (mild by Peruvian standards) or salty sauce, everything fried, some things steamed, and all served with hot sauces on the side to adjust heat to your preference. The most popular dishes seemed to be the enormous platters of seafood and rice. The same mussels and squid on soy sauce and oil-based rice with probably cheap bouillon powders for flavour (I’m looking at you MSG-based Maggi) with some filler vegetables. Absolutely delicious in a cheap “I could have done this at home, but for the price and the atmosphere and for not having to clean all those mussels, it’s worth getting it here”-kind of way.

The cilantro chicken was a dinner plate of tender chicken with potatoes and carrots in a soupy green/brown sauce from the mild cilantro. Rice on the side. This is a day’s worth of food but it’s easy to eat it all, probably for the same addictive sauce/MSG reasons. So, so good…

And the other most popular dish is certainly the tasting platter: causa (like a layered potato and seafood salad), anticucho (marinated beef hearts on a stick), a little bit of ceviche with the lime-based leche de tigre, fried potatoes, a generous helping of heavily-battered calamari, and mayonnaise-drenched squid. This is a meal in itself to be shared. The ceviche was actually impressive – the same un-named, surely unsustainable white fish was tender and the leche de tigre was a good citrus-heat balance (the marinating juices from the fish that are said to be energizing and endorphin-pumping. My only ceviche complaint being that in the small appetizer platter you don’t get boiled sweet potato and giant white corn kernels – the Peruvian standard.

The batter was way too thick on the calamari, but if you like calamari super deep-fried and greasy (but freshly fried), this is your place. The marinated octopus in mayonnaise (Pulpo al Olivo) was sweet and sticky. The anticucho beef heart needed a bit more marinating – tough steak-lovers will enjoy it. But true tough steak-lovers should stick with the lomo saltado (stir-fried beef strips – the classic cheap fill-you-up all over Lima). The causa was impressive, though. Creamy, dairy-free mashed potato with a touch of chili pepper layered with mayonnaise-coated seafood (you don’t want to know what kind of seafood probably). Though they don’t mold it (it would take a fair bit more effort to make a mold and do a layer of potato followed by a layer of seafood salad followed by another layer of potato), it’s still a generous heap of fatty flavour. Homemade mayo? Maybe not. Enhanced mayo (Mayo with stuff added)? Probably.

Where would you possibly put dessert? Do you have a second stomach? Cows have extra stomachs but you just ate 1/2 of one of those probably, if you had the lomo saltado or the steak dishes…

They have alfajores, though – the creamy, custard-filled cookie dessert. European influence again with the custard. And you can have chicha morada, the purple fermented maize drink. Don’t think they made it there, but the super sweet drink is a Canadian treat. And, of course, Inka Kola – the corn syrup-based bright yellow, wholly unnatural-looking pop that’s more popular than Coke in Peru.

So it’s not fine dining, but it’s filling and friendly and a great ambiance. Plus a terrasse. And inexpensive, and you can add all the heat you want – just skip the jalapeno and go for the amarillo and rocoto paste (amarillo is hard to find and a little expensive compared with jalapeno and generic imported red peppers that are probably rocoto, so ask for it specifically). Rice, potatoes, and heaps and heaps of inexpensive meats and seafood. There’s a whole lot of the menu left to try…Others crave poutine. I crave Peruvian at Villa Wellington.