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This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting,The wok-fried chunks of steak, dressed in a soy-and-oyster sauce reduction spiked with vinegar, saturate the rice inside the tortilla, highlighting the sweet heat of ají amarillo mixed with the velvety texture of pinto beans.
It's a beautiful confluence of flavors. It is also, depending on who you ask, either a creative act of evolution or a betrayal of Peruvian culinary heritage. AirTalk Food: Queen’s Raw Bar & Grill "AirTalk" host Austin Cross sat down with the chef and managing director of Queen’s Raw Bar & Grill in Eagle Rock to talk about their refreshing seafood. Keep up with LAist.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less. The lomo saltado burrito at Merka Saltao wasn't exactly a calculated move.
Lifelong friends Alonso Franco and Ignacio Barrios — who met in high school in Lima — came to Los Angeles to bring Peruvian food to the masses, first through a ghost kitchen concept they ran from 2021 to 2023. The burrito happened almost by accident: a member of their kitchen team brought in a tortilla one day, someone suggested wrapping the lomo saltado in it, they ate it, and within three days, it was on the menu.
Merka Saltao co-founders Ignacio Barrios, left, and Alonso Franco, right, inside their Culver City restaurant. The two lifelong friends from Lima opened the fast-casual brick-and-mortar location for their Peruvian concept in August 2025. The data from the ghost kitchen made the case for keeping it there. Franco and Barrios had launched with around 140 dishes — lomo saltado, ceviche, chicken dishes, the works.
But the numbers kept pointing to the same thing: wherever lomo saltado appeared on the menu, in whatever form, burrito, bowl, salad, it was the winner. The two friends made the leap to brick-and-mortar in August 2025, opening Merka Saltao in downtown Culver City.
It's one of the more competitive dining corridors in L.A. , the kind of block that can support a $16 wellness bowl and a craft beer bar in the same stretch, populated by Amazon employees on lunch breaks, families on weekend outings, and food-literate regulars who will absolutely have opinions about what goes in a burrito. Those opinions arrived faster than Franco expected.
Within the first week of opening, an influencer came in and posted about the restaurant — but instead of showing the full menu, the bowls, the chicha morada, the flexibility of the concept, they showed the burrito. Just the burrito. Franco working the wok at Merka Saltao. The high-heat wok technique at the heart of lomo saltado traces its roots to Chinese immigrants in PeruThe comments turned quickly.
"No! Peruvians don't eat burritos. ¿Qué car—o es eso?
" — roughly,"what the hell is this? " — wrote one commenter. Another said"Burritos? We don't eat burritos in 🇵🇪”.
Franco describes sitting at his computer reading the pile-on, feeling something between anger and devastation.
"There was a moment where I probably even cried," he said,"thinking, I've made a mistake. " But then he looked at the numbers. 30,000 had seen the post…. And half the comments were in his defense. He took the conversation to Reddit, posting to r/FoodLosAngeles asking the community directly: am I wrong for this?
The response was overwhelming — hundreds of comments, almost entirely in his favor, and a surge of new customers walking through the door shortly after. This is Los Angeles, where many of the dishes that define the Southern California diet were born precisely from cultures colliding. Roy Choi built an empire on Korean tacos. Al pastor traces its technique to Lebanese immigrants who brought the vertical spit.
The California roll, invented by Japanese chefs in Los Angeles in the 1960s, introduced an entire country to sushi. None of these dishes destroyed the traditions they borrowed from. If anything, they expanded their audience. And the lomo saltado burrito isn't exactly a novel concept in Southern California to begin with — everyone fromrun by 2025 James Beard Award-nominated chef Daniel Castillo, has featured their own version.
Even Disney's California Adventure got in on it, serving a lomo saltado burrito out of theThe lomo saltado bowl and burrito at Merka Saltao in Culver City — two versions of the same dish that sparked an unlikely online debate about Peruvian culinary identity. Franco would also point out that lomo saltado itself — the dish the purists are so eager to protect — is a product of Chinese immigrants bringing the wok and soy sauce to Peru roughly 300 years ago.
"Peruvian is by default fusion," he told me. "So we have all the right to wrap it up in a burrito. " What the online critics were really doing, whether they knew it or not, was defending a dish that was itself once considered inauthentic — and doing so in the name of authenticity.
Since the backlash, Franco says business has been mostly steady — breaking even, which for a concept that requires high volume at a low price point, he considers a good sign. The controversy changed things in ways he didn't expect: people started coming in specifically because of the story, not just the food.
He began putting himself front and center in the brand, regularly making videos on social media about what it's like to run the business, occasionally poking fun at himself and the whole debate. When we visited during the weekday lunch rush, there was a steady line of people waiting to order, many stopping to talk with Franco directly.
In a way, he's answered the authenticity question not with an argument but with a presence — showing up, telling the story, letting the food speak.
"Honoring my food, if that requires pairing lomo saltado with a salad or wrapping it in a tortilla, I have no problem," he said. "I'm not being less authentic. We are evolving in Peru anytime. I have to be authentic on the individual flavor and then be flexible to reach more people to discover our flavors.
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Lomo Saltado Burrito Merka Saltao Peruvian Food Culver City Peruvian Restaurant Culver City
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