“This is the story of the chaufa,” said Jose Diaz, co-owner and head chef of Icaru, the no-frills Peruvian bistro on lower Elm Street, as he seasoned boneless chicken with garlic and ginger, and turned up the flame on the range.
The story begins in Peru in the mid- to late-19th century when the abolition of slavery had plantation owners in search of another form of cheap labor. They found it in 100,000 Chinese immigrants, mostly Cantonese, paying them with sacks of rice, which the workers fried with soy sauce and any vegetables or scraps of meat they could find.
“But not chicken,” Diaz said during a recent interview. “Too expensive.” That came later, on completion of their eight-year indentured servitude, when workers settled in cities and set up restaurants to make a living. They brought the chaufa—literally, chow fun, or fried rice, in Cantonese — with them, with the dish over time mingling with the flavors of Peru.
“One thing is for sure,” Diaz said. “You wouldn’t find this in traditional Chinese takeout.”
Diaz hails from Ica in southwestern Peru. When he was 17, a friend came over to his house to prepare a barbecue there. He asked Diaz to help. Something clicked.
“I enjoyed it right away, putting ingredients together, waiting to see what’s going to come out there,” Diaz said, scrambling eggs in a pan. He started looking into culinary schools.
His father had other ideas. “For him, culinary was not like being a doctor or lawyer, it was a school for lazy people,” he said. It was dental school or bust. Diaz lasted two years. “Not enough action, not enough creativity,” he said. At 19, he and younger brother Pedro headed for America. “We do all things together.”
They settled in New York, where Diaz enrolled in the culinary arts and hospital management program at Westchester Community College. At night, he worked as a delivery driver for a pizzeria. “That gave me the flexibility to go to school and pay for my school,” he said, as he added oil to a skillet. “We want to get it hot, but not too hot.” A flame sprang up. He threw in the chicken. “There’s a difference between smoky and burnt.”
In his second year, he got a job as a cook’s helper at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. For the next two years, “a trial by fire,” as he put it, he was constantly challenged to learn new techniques. “The head chef gave me a lot of confidence,” he said. He spooned in onion and chopped garlic, stir-frying them for a few minutes, and then introduced a bowful of cooked rice. “That was when I knew I made the right decision.”
After graduation, Diaz landed a position as an executive chef with the Compass Group, the global food services company that contracts its employees to client locations around the world. After working at an assisted living facility, an executive chef position at Yale New Haven Hospital became available. Diaz took it. He stayed two years, until the company moved him to another assisted living facility in White Plains.
While at Yale-New Haven, Diaz had spotted the location on Elm Street and made an offer on it. Upon returning home after working a full day in White Plains, he and his brother Pedro worked on the design, the decor, the equipment, the menu. “We started at 9 p.m. and we spent all night cleaning the kitchen and painting,” he recalled, as he tossed the chicken with the rice, threw in the eggs, and added a shot of soy sauce, as well as ginger extract. “We didn’t have the budget.”
He also put Pedro through his own culinary school. “We needed another chef, with me in White Plains during the day,” he said. “This had become my dream, to open my own restaurant, and Pedro, he has been with me since the beginning, so it was our dream.”
Icaru opened at 39 Elm St. in February 2023, with Diaz coming from work every evening and Pedro at the range through the day. It took off. “I taught him everything I knew, and out of the pressure, out of the fire, he came, almost as good as me,” said Diaz, grinning, plating the dish with scallions, cilantro, and cumin, before drizzling oyster sauce and sesame oil on top. Pedro emerged from the back, smiling. Already the place was filling up. A few orders were in.
“I like to see people’s faces when they eat the food and they taste the flavors, that makes me so happy,” said Diaz, as he stood alongside his brother at the grill, launching into the next dish of the day, lomo saltado, or stir fried beef, another fusion of Chinese and Peruvian cuisine. “It makes it all worthwhile.”
For this correspondent, Chaufa de Pollo proved a delightful medley of texture, composition, and flavor. The rice was crispy, the vegetables aromatic, and the notes of cilantro, cumin, and ginger seemed an evocation of Peru. True to Diaz’s aim, the chicken, tender, well-seasoned, and substantial, had a certain smoky, almost Hibachi-like, essence. All in all, a tasty, hearty, and sustaining meal.
This correspondent, for one, expressed gratitude to the skies that Jose Diaz did not become a dentist.
