Peruvian Americans have flocked to this Queens restaurant for nearly 50 years
A restaurant in Jackson Heights called Urubamba — after an Andean folk band — has been a destination for New York City's Peruvian American community since 1976.
Every table at Urubamba was taken on a recent Sunday afternoon. The restaurant was abuzz with families, couples and friends chatting in Spanish, with snippets of English every now and then. Some of the customers had gone there as children and were now returning with their own families. But it wasn’t so easy in the beginning. Julian Estorga, Maria Ruiz and their 4-year-old son, Carlos Estorga, left Lima for California in 1962. They eventually settled in Corona, Queens, where Julian landed a carpentry contract.
Rojas has worked as a line cook and server at Urubamba since 2007, along with his sister Silvana Rojas, who is assistant manager and a server. The menu features homestyle dishes cooked with traditional techniques and ingredients, ranging from the chicha morada made from purple corn and cinnamon to the moist masa of the banana leaf-wrapped tamales stuffed with chunks of meat, whole black olives, and slivers of hard-boiled egg.
“Whenever we were making tamales at the huge assembly table we have downstairs, my grandmother would oversee that until her last days, even though my dad has been making them for decades," said Rojas, who founded his own modern, upscale Peruvian restaurant called
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