Date Night Dining at Lima: phenomenal food, needs speed

The ceviche was divine. The wait was not.

So here is some advice for the diner who wants to cozy up to a pisco sour and his or her sweetheart at the new Lima restaurant in Golden Gate: Bring your iPad so you can clean out stray photos. Balance your checkbook, if you're a better financial planner than I am. But wait for the food, because Dario González-Zúñiga's is a treat: beautifully seasoned, original and carefully chosen.

González-Zúñiga creates it fresh -- in fact, he had run out of his handmade pasta when we ordered the loma saltado (beef saute) & fettuccini ($18), and had insisted on making more, which led to the extra-long wait. The idea of pasta alone might turn some food lovers' heads: What's fettuccini doing in Peruvian cuisine, where rice is a staple? With parents from Italy and Peru, González-Zúñiga has experimented -- with tasty results -- on his native country's cuisine. He has created a shrimp ravioli with sundried red chili sauce ($18)  that only the early birds are assured of getting because of its popularity. The churrasco con tallarín verde (grilled flank steak with Peruvian-style pesto and pasta, $16) made us wish we'd been cloned.

The restaurant, tucked into a plaza with a clique of storefront restaurants and Ace Hardware, is a spacious place with a side lounge area and a more brightly lighted restaurant component. We opted for more romantic lighting and a glance, from our comfortable mahogany seats and gleaming matching tables, toward the pisco bar.  It's underlighted, like a road racer, and offers full liquor service in addition to the piscos, au naturel or infused.

While a pisco sour is a pricey proposition at $10, or $11 infused with your choice of fruit flavors, the Peruvian variety goes full-strength from copper pot stills to bottles. In other words, one of these can last you an evening. People like me will have wonderfully vivid dreams, too. My dining companion voted for the sole Peruvian beer offering, Cusqueña, and was more than happy with its pilsner heartiness.

Because we opted for the bar, we received the tapas menu, too, and it's perfect for the inveterate sampler. There are hot dishes for sharing like the "Fast and Furious" chicken wings in Rocoto pepper sauce ($6); an interesting offering of grilled, marinated beef heart kabobs (sanguche de chicharron, $7); and jalea ($7), a crispy melange of calamari, shrimp and fish with a black peppermint sauce. Alas, it, too, is a fast seller and was gone by our 8:15 p.m. arrival time. I contented myself with chaufarroncito ($7), a seasoned Peruvian fried rice with chunks of confit pork belly, vegetables and slightly tender sautéed red onions.

I couldn't finish it and hope to do justice to my ceviche. In the meantime, my table partner gushed over his freshly made, tender pasta in a creamy yellow pepper sauce — close to a Béarnaise consistency and richly mellow rather than hot.

I was under the attitude I wouldn’t be testing my fachismo — female machismo —with a little extra spice, and requested mine to be ratcheted up to medium heat. My mouth-searing lesson: Medium spice in South America approaches a No. 4 on the Thai heat scale. Make sure you have water for the lingering afterburn, but savor that rich broth and lime-finished fish when it’s going down.

Lima’s ceviche is a hearty dish with morsels of fish that come out with the texture of lobster from their marinade “cooking.” It’s in in a chilled stew of tangy red onion strips, the juicy lemon-lime-garlic base, fresh-chopped cilantro and relatively mild Peruvian peppers. Sweet potato chunks in the broth help cool the palate, as do an outcropping of huge kernels— almost Lima bean-size — of Peruvian corn.

Amanda, Dario’s wife and pisco bar manager, took the brunt of my dining partner’s wrath that dinner was slow seriously, and brought him a glass of house wine to compensate.

At that point, however, we were being won over by the food. For those who have any room left, there are bakery desserts such as the Peruvian national cookie, alfajores. Buttery and rich sandwiches of Dario’s own homemade dulce de leche, they’re big enough to share.  Stuffed? Buy one to take home for a heavenly breakfast with strong black coffee.

Would we go back? Absolutely — but early so we can have full run of the menu. The dinner one has its own set of appetizers, such as chili-sauced potatoes ($8) and an escaveche that sounds like my next meal: a chilled potato-yellow pepper bisque-like soup with marinated fried fish and avocado ($12).

We will ask whether there’s pasta ready before we order it. There’s too much else that’s delicious on the menu to wait.

Dining notes

Where: 11681 Collier Blvd, Golden Gate

Contact: lima-restaurant.com or (239) 280-0167

The fare: Tapas, $6-7; appetizers and first courses, $6-13; soups and salads, $8-14; entrées, $12-20