La Parrillada, Petersham

Mmm... meat...

If anyone knows meat, it's the South Americans. And so we find ourselves in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shopfront along busy Parramatta Road, La Parrillada, a Peruvian embrace for the carnivore within.




The restaurant is bigger than it first looks. The jukebox in the window obscures your view of the large room at the back, especially the partially raised dance floor, complete with disco lights and shimmering disco ball slowly spinning from the ceiling. Spanish arches line both walls, and there's a riff-raff of mementos including mounted bull horns, wooden house decorations, ornamental plates, an overdose of Christmas lights and even a climbing Santa (late, or early, it's hard to tell).




La Parrillada sauces: tomato sauce, fiery chilli sauce
and mild coriander chilli sauce

A bowl of bread rolls, fresh from the oven and warmed till crusty, is the perfect vehicle for exploring the trio of La Parrillada sauces before us. Quickly we dub the orange one in the centre "novacaine". It's hot but in a strange tongue-numbing way, the embers of heat slowly building in the mouth long after you've swallowed, creating a lingering dullness on the tongue and inner cheek.

The green chilli sauce is mild with the flavour of coriander, garlic and lemon, reminiscent of a salsa verde. The red one is tomato.


Sangria jug $15.00

I'm devastated to hear there is no chicha morada purple corn juice today. No Pisco sour either, a Peruvian cocktail make with Pisco brandy, lemon juice, egg whites, sugar syrup and bitters. The Pisco sour is made only on weekends, we hear.

We console ourselves with a jug of sangria instead, a sweeter-than-normal version of the fruity red wine punch.


French fries

The wait for our food is a little torturous. Thirty minutes isn't a particularly long time to wait, but the smells of charcoal and spitting fat and the sight of diners feasting on sides of cow and chicken carcasses doesn't help the increasingly urgent protests from your grumbling stomach.

But suddenly the chips arrive, golden shards of deep-fried carbohydrate glory, and then the garden salad and then...


Garden salad



MEAT! It's a vegetarian's worst nightmare, but the breakout of lecherous smiles at our table is wholeheartedly carnivorous.


Parrillada Isabella’s Deluxe (for six persons or more) $129.90

OVER 3 KG OF MEAT
Mix of fresh tender pieces of meat: 2x beef sirloin steak, 2x beef T-bone steak,
beef New York steak, 2x pork loin chops, lamb grilled and 2x South American chorizo.

Cooked on a char-grill marinated with a special sauce. Individually served on a
sizzling BBQ on the table accompanied with a garden salad, French fries and
La Parrillada sauces.

Seven of us share the platter of meat for six. It's a feast of carnage. Cow, pig, lamb. We tear into sirloin steak, strips of lamb, and pork chops with skin that's been roasted until crackling.

The chorizo isn't particularly spicy, and the sirloin is a little chewy, but the T-bone is marvellous, soft and tender with crispy skin.



The glowing charcoal beneath our grill seems more for decorative purposes than cooking. Just as well, since we'd ordered ours rare but almost everything had arrived medium-well. And it doesn't take long for us to make short work of it all (about 33 minutes, but who's counting).



We luck out again on the dessert menu too. There's a creme caramel, lucuma ice cream (a South American fruit) and tiramisu, but no leche asada, a traditional baked custard made with milk eggs and sugar.

The consolation prize? Four scoops of gelato from Bar Italia instead.


Pistachio, walnut, hazelnut and coffee gelato $8.00


Cannoli

La Parrillada
470 Parramatta Road, Petersham, Sydney
Tel: +61 (02) 9560 0943

Tuesday to Friday 5.30pm-10pm
Saturday 4pm–11pm
Sunday 4pm–9pm
Closed Mondays

Mariachi band performs on Friday and Saturday nights.

All-you-can-eat beef ribs, pork ribs, charcoal chicken and chorizo
for only $19.90 Tuesdays to Thursdays

CASH ONLY
Corkage $6 per bottle (wine only)


Bar Italia
169 Norton Street, Leichhardt, Sydney
Tel: +61 (02) 9560 9981

Open 7 days 9am-late