However, New World influences have increasingly been seen on local menus: Azabu does the Japanese-Peruvian fusion called "nikkei"; corn-based dishes cater to the gluten-averse; everywhere you look there's tamale this and taco that. Now Inti seeks to take the game up a notch by offering a sort of South American fine-dining at mid-range prices.
Named for the sun god who was the Incas' No 1 deity, Inti occupies the room that was home, for less than a year, to the ill-judged Meat Fish Wine. The same owners are behind Inti, and Javier Carmona (Beirut, Oaken, Exteberria and, er, the Mexico chain) presides in the kitchen, whipping up interesting and exotic dishes that riff on or quote from Central and South American traditions rather than just replicating them.
Thus chicharron, a pork-rind dish that occurs all over the former Spanish empire, including in the Philippines, is done as a delightful variant on the pub's pork scratchings, deep-fried and puffed up like a massive shrimp chip and served with a mole (the chilli-chocolate sauce whose dozen other ingredients are the most closely guarded of chefs' secrets); a salsa based on nuts and pumpkin seeds is delicately spicy, and comes with three kinds of bread, including a brioche-like sweet bun called a concha and a tortilla pocket made of cricket flour.
Alpaca meat, agreeably though not distinctively tasty, and fennel filled a torta ahogada (literally, a drowned cake), a pair of small sub sandwiches that, true to the name, were swamped with a chilli gravy before we ate them: it came from a street food section of the menu, which made its blandness puzzling, and it mainly served to make a mess, so we were glad for the fingerbowl that was supplied.
I enjoyed the serving of sensationally tender sous-vide beef served under a blanket of edible silver - a reference perhaps to the name of Argentina, which is where the sub-continent's best beef is found. But I had to share the Professor's view of a dish she described as "challenging": a steamed tamale (the consistency of a Chinese bun) filled with mushrooms in which huitlacoche, a pestilential fungus commonly called corn smut, was rumoured to be putting in an appearance. We both agreed that if we could have tasted anything we probably wouldn't have liked it.
Desserts were a knockout: a foamy crema catalana studded with roasted barley and a variation of cheesecake that was spoonably creamy and came with cucumber ice and small shards of burnt meringue. This is food you'll find in no dim Bolivian back street, but it has an authenticity all its own.
