- [Narrator] My whole life, we always had soy sauce at home,
we always had ginger, and things like this.
I never questioned it until we went to Peru, and
it all came together.
Little by little, I began to figure out,
"Oh, this Japanese-Peruvian food is an entire culture."
(wind and traffic rushing)
In the late 1800s, early 1900s,
Japanese people moved to Peru for work,
and they began to develop their families
and their own communities and their own cuisine.
Their lives became ingrained with the Peruvian culture.
Nikkei cuisine developed from Japanese people
using what was around them in Peru
to prepare their traditional Japanese food.
It's not a fusion of two cuisines; it's their culture.
Sen Sakana falls on the spectrum of Nikkei
more in a Japanese fashion.
We have a lot more of Japanese traditional food
made with Peruvian ingredients.
Chef Taku and I worked directly on the menu,
making sure that each part of our cuisines were represented.
Whether there was enough aji,
a very spicy Peruvian chili pepper,
or maybe one dish was not Japanese-y enough,
or even a simple plating.
We both worked on each one of the dishes,
bringing both of our knowledges,
from my background in Peru and his in Japanese cuisine.
Chicken nanban is a traditional Japanese dish;
however, we've added something called salsa criolla,
which is all over Peru.
It's onions that have been washed a lot
and then tossed with lime juice and cilantro,
so it acts as a palate cleanser.
When we make the chicken nanban,
the chicken is floured and we put it in a batter
that's made with two different kinds of Japanese flours.
Then, once it's battered, we dip it into quinoa,
red and white quinoa.
It's crusted, and then it's fried.
We serve it with a traditional Japanese potato salad
that we have added aji amarillo to,
so it's a little bit spicy.
On top, we add a black vinegar sauce,
which is a traditional nanban sauce.
It's a sweet-and-sour sauce, but, to ours,
we've added manjo and an aji rocoto.
And the both the sweet and the savory
just make a great marriage.
Our torch salmon ceviche Nikkei is 100% [a] chef Taku creation.
Ceviche is said to be the one dish that
there isn't the perfect way to make it --
it's the Italian grandmother's meatballs.
Everybody's grandmother makes it the best.
We torch salmon, and then we cut it up into large chunks,
and it's tossed in lime juice, yuzu juice,
a little spicy aji inside.
We lightly bathe it with an acid.
For example, the Nikkei ceviche is yuzu.
We put it on the dish, with aji, and cilantro, and onions --
key elements in every single ceviche.
There's two types of corn on the dish.
Cancha, the Peruvian corn,
and choclo, the large white kernel,
so it's very refreshing. And then you have
a little bit of the saltiness from shio kombu
and the crispy sweet potatoes.
Our garnishes sets the Nikkei nigiri apart from a classic.
It adds spice, it adds that flavor.
We brought that spice forward to, whereas,
traditionally, it would just be the fish and rice
with a little bit of wasabi.
On our salmon, it is a gooseberry, which are from Peru,
with a beet puree underneath,
and the salmon is a lot more oily,
and it can carry a heavier style of topping.
The gooseberry is very high in acid.
The sweetness of the beets, we put it right on top
and all those flavors mix in your mouth.
The Japanese chicken curry empanada,
that is really a labor of love.
It is a great Japanese curry with
all the vegetables you would find.
Any Latin American country has empanadas,
and so we were looking to do something
that was a nice one bite.
Nikkei is people's, essentially, lives,
how they would live their every day life in Peru.
Many Peruvians'll say, "What is this?"
And I say, "It's our Nikkei."
We certainly take a lot of licenses.
There's no clear definition of what this exactly is.
It's not like saying,
"The five mother sauces in French cuisine are so, so, and so.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago,
Escoffier made it like this, and that's how it was."
No.
There is no definition.
We're here to define it.
It's approachable.
You know what you like Japanese food,
you know you like Peruvian food,
and so Nikkei brings it all together.
What the bagel is to the New York Jew.
The Jews that came here and began to make their food
with what they had here.
Now, those are native New Yorker foods.
It's the same as in Peru.
Japanese people moved to Peru and
they developed what they had around them.
Nikkei became their blood.
It ingrained inside their bloodlines.