Mutually Assured Deliciousness

Peruvian and Chinese cuisine live in wedded bliss at Tulsa’s Pachac.

- GREGEL WELL

MORE THAN TEN thousand miles separate China and Peru, but you can taste them both in a little strip mall in west Tulsa.

Pachac Peruvian Food celebrates the century-old fusion of Chinese and Peruvian cuisine served in chifas, a type of Cantonese restaurant using Peruvian ingredients, that are the result of a large immigration of Chinese and other Asian men into the South American country as laborers starting in the mid-1800s.

Owner Humberto “Bert” Nieri and his parents, Humberto Sr. and Maria, are originally from Lima, Peru, but came to America via California and Nevada before settling down in Oklahoma.

“This is just the food we like,” he says. “My dad had family that cooked for big companies and luxury hotels, and that’s where he picked up his recipes and learned how to cook.”

It seems odd calling Pachac a fusion restaurant, if only because that’s such a recent term. After more than a hundred years, this blend of Peruvian and Chinese cuisines is as fused as they come.