Expect the unexpected at Chifa

If you are craving predictability on the restaurant row (Eastern Division) that is the 700 block of Chestnut Street, you might want to walk right on past Chifa, the newest Jose Garces contender: The prime steaks are next door at the vaulted-ceilinged Union Trust; the comfort food is at Jones across the street, where "Thanksgiving Dinner," should you have missed it (or have an off-season hankering for it), is on the menu every night.

At the Peruvian-Chinese hybrid called Chifa you will find, instead, bowls of chaufa rice, a stir-fry dotted with chorizo and topped with sweetly tender soy-glazed scallops, and diminutive ceviches far more complex (and the flavors far more balanced) than at your average ceviche bar, and, ahh!, pork belly buns, liberated from those doughy balls on the Chinatown dim sum cart; here they sport small steamed pancakes top and bottom, the grilled, shredded pork looking like barbecue - until you hit the slick of hoisin.

"Chifa" itself is multiple-meaninged. It is the cuisine that evolved in Peru after the influx of Chinese laborers 150 years ago, many of them literally "shanghaied" and shipped to work in the guano mines and plantations after the emancipation of the African slaves. Soy sauce ended up in Creole dishes, the national favorite lomo saltado for one, which at Chifa, the restaurant, is not merely mundane beef and stubby french fries over rice, but elegant beef tenderloin with fried potatoes tossed in soy-ginger-scallion sauce and stir-fried vegetables over rice. Ginger started showing up, and five-spice blends, and - because Peru was later host to a sizable Japanese immigration, as well - edamame beans and sushi technique and even a chile-flecked mayonnaise called togarashi.

But chifa cookery caught on so insistently that the places serving it (upwards of 4,000 in Lima alone) came to be called chifas, too: In Peru you get your chifa at the local chifa.

Even the handful of chifa-heads hereabouts will find Chifa unpredictable: It is Peruvian-"inspired," says Garces; and Chinese-"inspired." (A recorded phone greeting, in fact, promises only "Latin-Asian" food, giving Garces wiggle room to interpret and reconstruct the dishes of not just Peru, or a subset of its cookery, but of China's Canton province and the coastal beachfronts of Ecuador, Garces' ancestral home.