Destino

[ Originally posted January 8, 2012.  Moving to blog now to complete my trio of Peruvian reviews. ]

I've been on Peruvian crawl, and have been to three different Peruvian places in the past week (the others were La Mar and the new Limon Rotisserie in Bayview).  Destino was by far the worst.  Do not recommend. We only got 3 appetizers and decided to leave and go elsewhere (Absinthe, for decent crab and desserts), it was that bad.

I think I hated this more than my dining companions, but I don't think any of us particularly liked the food.

Yuca fries with mint mojo sauce.  $6.  Fried plantain chips with serranto-cilantro salsa. $4.

The yucca fries were overly greasy, with an old oil sort of flavor. They were very starchy and unevenly cooked. The yuca fries at Limon were much better.  The mint mojo was kinda nice.

The plantain chips were, again, overly oily. No real flavor to them at all.  The plantain chips from La Mar were much, much better.  The serranto-cilantro salsa accompanying them was very boring.

We also ordered the crema de recoto salsa ($1.50 extra) to try to add some kick to these.  I figured we could save anything with some good sauce.  Unfortunately, it also was flavorless.

Ceviche Sampler.  $24.

We couldn't decide on which ceviche to order, but luckily they offer a sampler platter.  They were all varying degrees of bad.

(L to R):

• Del Caribe: "Butterfish, coconut milk, piquillo pepper, serrano chili, fried leeks."  This was my favorite, but that shouldn't be surprising as it was butterfish in coconut milk :) But still, not much flavor in the marinade and the butterfish wasn't as melt in your mouth as it should be.
• Mixto: "Mahi mahi, baby octopus, tiger prawn, habanero, lemon, tomato, avacado, plantain chip." This one had decent flavor and the octopus chunks were fine, but the mahi mahi was pretty awful.  I had 2 pieces that were really grisly and hard.
• A la Pernana: "Red snapper, aji amarillo, onions, cornnuts, sweet potato chips." This was downright horrible. The snapper was incredibly fishy and off tasting. Ugh! 

Not surprisingly, the ceviches from both La Mar and Limon were much better.  $24 was way too expensive for this low quality fish.