I found my restaurant love match in downtown Oakland

If I had connected with Lucuma on Tinder, I totally would have “Super Liked” it. Downtown Oakland’s delightful Peruvian newcomer has all the attributes I’m looking for in a restaurant: an eclectic, well-designed space; a lot of love; and a perfectly cooked beef heart — the latter being something I didn’t even know I needed in my life. But after dinner at Lucuma, I apparently do.

The ability to “Super Like” someone is an actual function of the dating app on which Lucuma’s owners, Renzo Roca and Garrett Morris, met when they went searching for a match. “He Super Liked me, and I Super Liked him back,” Morris says with a meet-cute kind of grin. The two have been together for nine years and are engaged. 

Roca and Morris has both been in the industry for a long time, but Lucuma — named for a Peruvian fruit — is their first joint endeavor. Roca, who was born in Lima, was general manager of the recently closed Peruvian restaurant Piqueos, which operated in SF’s Bernal Heights for almost 15 years. Morris last worked at a fine-dining restaurant, Maggie’s in the Desolation Hotel in South Lake Tahoe. Last July, word got around Piqueos that the restaurant’s building was to be sold. So Roca and Morris started scheming about what they could do together. 

They landed on opening a Peruvian restaurant with their own flair — the duo have lots to spare — and bringing along the whole Piqueos team, including head chef Wilbert Ek Tun. This eliminated the dilemma of finding dependable staff. “Everywhere here is like family,” Roca says. “They come to our house for Christmas.”

They also knew they wanted a location outside of San Francisco, where liquor licenses are triple the cost and rents are too high. This follows some of Oakland’s hottest tickets — including Sun Moon Studio, Burdell, and Jaji — all run by chefs who started out in San Francisco.

However, the impetus was more than financial. Oakland is their hometown; their hood is Temescal. “Before Covid, downtown Oakland was so amazing. But it’s lost that energy,” Morris says. “We want to bring Downtown back to the good ole days.” So when the brick, light-filled corner location that previously housed Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessan came available, they nabbed it.

The space is long and narrow. There is an open kitchen. The dining room is crowded in an energetic way — you have to weave your way through the tables to get to the bar, which is where my friend and I sat, chatting with the affable Morris, who, though not Peruvian, will be mixing cocktails while directing the staff in Spanish learned from shopping endeavors with his mother-in-law to be.

Using a magic wand (in actuality, a tool called an Evebot used for printing on cocktails and cappuccinos), Morris inscribes “Lucuma” on the fluffy layer of egg whites atop the pisco sours. He injects smoke into a glass cloche placed over a fancy, palo-santo-rinsed cocktail called the Inca Old Fashioned ($22). I prefer a simpler cocktail, so I had the El Capitan ($16), a slightly sweet, maraschino-cherry-garnished Peruvian classic made with vermouth and pisco Quebranta (a popular variety of grape used in making pisco, which is a brandy), infused with a shred of heat from aji panca, a mild and smoky Peruvian chile. 

Even before your food is served, there is a lot to digest. Everywhere is something to lock eyes with. The space was designed by the couple, who collected pieces on visits to Peru, including the 250 quipu hanging over the front door. What looks like knotted rope was used by the Incas as a record-keeping device (“the first computer,” as Morris puts it). There’s a long line of chrome, midcentury-esque chandeliers and red glass pendant lights; the bar is backed with blingy mirrored hexagon tiles and decorated with Peruvian pottery. A piece of art on the far wall was done by their friend Tobias Tovera, who made it with Peruvian minerals and salts.

When dinner arrives, it is done well. For the uninformed, it may seem a wacky mix — from tequeñitos, fried, cheese-filled “wontons” with guacamole ($14) to tallarines verdes, a ribeye steak with Peruvian pesto pasta ($52). But if you’ve ever dipped into Peruvian fare, you’ll recognize the collision of Indigenous, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Italian cuisines. Dishes swing wildly from delicate ceviches with large, toothy kernels of choclo (Peruvian corn) to hefty portions of meat and potatoes.

A perfect example is the anticuchos ($22), the skewered, grilled beef heart that won my own. Morris says the classic dish is rarely done well in the U.S.; at Lucuma, it’s slightly charred but pink in the middle, with just the right amount of chew. The dish is spooned with huancaina, a traditional sauce made of bread, Oaxaca cheese, milk, and aji amarillo (another staple Peruvian chile), as well as herby chimichurri. Rather than the boiled potato it would normally be served with, Lucuma pairs it with a schmancy, crispy-creamy layered square of pavé potatoes, a French dish.

Of the ceviches, I tried the tiradito clasico ($25), which has slippery slices of wild salmon in a shallow, creamy emulsified sauce of rocoto pepper and aji amarillo — but there are 13 others I will be back to try soon. From the entrees, the pescado a lo macho ($34), a seafood stew made with chiles and coconut milk, tastes like a mild and homey Southeast Asian curry. Or maybe it just tastes Peruvian.

Though jungle music may be playing on the speakers, most of what Lucuma offers is traditional Peruvian. They even have picarones, hard-to-prepare and harder-to-find doughnuts (“We’re the only ones serving them,” Morris asserts) that are typically made with a winter squash that’s unavailable here, so they’ve substituted acorn. The crispy rounds are served with honey infused with dried fig leaves, cloves, anise, and cinnamon.

“We’ve had lots of Peruvians come in,” Morris says. “One woman, who was literally crying, asked to speak to an owner. And I thought, ‘Oh, no — what’s wrong?’ But she was over the moon. She said, ‘You took me back to my grandma’s house in Peru.’ ”