What Picca Served at Its ‘Mystery Meat Dinner’ Last Night

Braised intestine choncholin with anticucho sauce and spicy rocoto

Last night we sent our oligarch of offal to spy on Picca’s “Mystery Meat Dinner,” a procession of Peruvian dishes that incorporated Ricardo Zarate’s recipes with tripe, beef lungs, crickets, alpaca, braised intestine, and guess what? Chicken butt! That’s right. Starting with a culito de pollo a la brasa, Picca delivered six dishes to the table without revealing their contents, mingling each delicious bite with a mixture of terror and intrigue, before finally revealing what made them tick. Zarate, who plans to open his new Downtown location of Mo-Chica in about two weeks, scored again with a special one-off dinner that we’d like to see join Picca’s schedule more often. Take a look at our photos of the night’s fare and like the warning on the restaurant’s own menu, “best of luck digesting.”

Chicken butt with huancaina rustica and beet salad.

Alpaca stew with barley risotto (foreground) with Zarate’s alpaca and chorizo crostini.

The chitterlings were served marinated in anticucho sauce and served with a spicy rocoto sauce.

A tripe stew with Peruvian potatoes, topped with a jalapeno sarsa and cumin yogurt.

A stew of beef lungs mixed with the giant Peruvian mote corn kernels.

Dessert consisted of “sol y sombra” (sun and shade) mazzamora, a traditional rice pudding, here laced with crickets. We thought a real spit-fermented chica morada might show up at this point, too, but fortunately our team was spared.