Chifa Menu Dishes: How to Read the Carta and What to Order

Walk into a chifa in Peru and the carta, the menu, arrives the size of a placemat, half of it in words nobody translated. If you grew up with it, you don’t read it: you know the chifa menu dishes by heart and you order before the water lands. If you didn’t, you point at a laminated photo and hope.

This is the map. Chifa is Peru’s Chinese-Peruvian cooking and the restaurants that serve it, and the word comes from the Cantonese chi and fan, to eat rice. The carta runs almost the same everywhere: wantán frito to start, sopa wantán over the soups, then the big plates, chi jau kay, kam lu wantán, lomo saltado, then chaufa and tallarín saltado, and at the end what Peru invented, the combinado and the aeropuerto. We’ve told what chifa is and why there’s one in every town. Today we’re reading the carta.

There are two cartas at a chifa, and you’re holding the wrong one

As El Comercio puts it, a chifa almost always runs two cartas, one peruana and one properly Chinese, and it’s the Peruvian one they hand you. In multi-story chifas, the paper notes, the upper floor runs the specialized Chinese preparations the paisanos, the Chinese-Peruvian regulars, come for.

That isn’t gatekeeping. It’s a kitchen that has been learning what its neighbors order since the second half of the 1800s, and the menu in your hands is the shortlist, worth knowing cold.

How a chifa menu runs

A chifa carta tends to run in the same order: dim sum and entradas, the starters, then sopas, tallarines, arroces, combinados, with more sections by protein (pescados y mariscos, res, cerdo, pollo, pato asado). Menus differ house to house. The rhythm rarely does.

The wantán frito sits up top, in the entradas of a chifa carta: a small filled pastry with a seasoned meat filling, and fried is how most tables meet it, hot and blistered and gone in four minutes. The Real Academia Española lists wantán as a word used in Peru, which tells you how far it traveled.

Sopas: sopa wantán runs the section

Sopa wantán is the most common soup on a chifa carta, and the one dish that works as both courses: as an entrada, usually without protein; as a plato de fondo, a main to share, loaded with pollo, pato asado or chancho asado, the roast pork.

In the bowl: chicken broth, chicken, chancho asado, the fideo wantán, three or four wantanes. El Comercio’s soup guide is blunt about the broth: several hours, on chicken bones, or on pork bones simmered with whole chickens and roast duck. The greens change by house: cebolla china, the scallion, in some kitchens; col china, Chinese cabbage, and nothing else in others. Sillao, Peru’s own word for soy sauce, goes in at the table, by you, right before you eat.

The rest of the sopas section: sopa pac pow, the one El Comercio calls the ocho tesoros; sopa womin, long noodles, ordered less and less; sopa fuchifú, with chicken offal; sopa de pato.

The chifa menu dishes everyone orders

Chi jau kay

Chi jau kay is fried chicken under a glossy brown sauce: breast coated in chuño, potato starch, and deep-fried, then sauced with chicken broth, sillao and salsa de ostión, which is oyster sauce, plus kion, ginger, garlic and cebolla china. Sesame seeds over the top, chaufa alongside. El Comercio counts chi jau kay among the classics of Peruvian chifa.

Kam lu wantán

Kam lu wantán is the sweet-and-sour one: a bed of wantanes under chancho, pollo and langostinos, with pineapple, holantao, the flat green bean, pimiento and cebolla china, crowned with tamarind sauce. Salty and sweet at once, kam lu wantán is one of the most requested plates on a chifa carta.

Lomo saltado

Lomo saltado is on the chifa carta because it’s built the chifa way: Peruvian beef, cebolla morada, tomato, ají amarillo and papas fritas, cooked with the salteado, the fast, high-heat wok technique, plus sillao and Chinese rice. Lomo saltado has its own story.

Arroces y tallarines: the rice and noodle plates

Arroz chaufa

Arroz chaufa is Peruvian fried rice, from chau fan, born to use up leftover white rice: rice, sillao, cebolla china, a tortilla of egg cut through it, and pieces of meat, poultry, fish or shrimp. We have the recipe.

Tallarín saltado

Tallarín saltado is Chinese noodles thrown in the wok with holantao, brócoli, pimiento rojo, col china and frejol chino, plus your protein, seasoned with sillao and salsa de ostión. The Spanish says exactly what tallarín saltado is: stir-fried noodles.

Combinado vs aeropuerto: what’s the difference

The combinado serves chaufa and tallarín saltado on one plate, side by side: de pollo means chaufa with a chicken tallarín; especial piles on chancho, pollo, carne and langostinos.

The aeropuerto cooks rice and noodles into each other in one pan, with pollo, huevo, pimiento, frejol chino and cebolla china. Nobody has settled where the name came from. El Comercio reports two accounts: one, credited to the anthropologist Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, ties the name to the tallarines and frejolitos chinos that “landed” in Peru; the other, which the paper flags as the story that got popular rather than the documented one, puts the first ones in fondas near the Jorge Chávez airport. Take your pick; the plate is the same either way.

What to order at a chifa

El Comercio names the default table order: chaufa especial, tallarín saltado, wantán frito. Order those three at your first chifa and you have ordered correctly. The next step out, the paper says, is a sopa wantán or a tipakay, the sweet-sour chicken.

For a table of four, add that sopa wantán to share and one saucy plate that isn’t fried, kam lu wantán or chi jau kay, so there’s something to spoon over rice.

One honest warning: the allergens hiding in these dishes

• Shellfish. Salsa de ostión is in chi jau kay, tallarín saltado and kam lu wantán, which puts shellfish on plates with no visible seafood, and there’s no clean swap for it inside those dishes. Langostinos, too, in kam lu wantán and the combinado especial.
• Soy and wheat. Sillao is in nearly everything here, so soy is close to unavoidable, and most commercial soy sauce is brewed with wheat. The wantán wrappers and the noodles are wheat too. Treat a chifa carta as not gluten-free by default.
• Sesame. Visible as seeds on chi jau kay, invisible as aceite de ajonjolí, sesame oil, in kam lu wantán and chaufa.
• Egg and pork. Egg runs through chaufa, aeropuerto and kam lu wantán; pork through the wantán filling and the soup.

Why this is a chifa carta and not a Chinese one

Peruvian ingredients climbed into the wok, which is how lomo saltado with ají amarillo and papas fritas ends up in a Chinese restaurant. The pantry got Peruvian names: kion, sillao, holantao. And the carta grew inventions that exist nowhere else: the combinado, the aeropuerto. The cooking that made this carta possible starts in the kitchens of Calle Capón, in Lima’s Barrio Chino.

That’s the trick of chifa. It isn’t food from somewhere else, served in Peru. It’s Peruvian food written in two languages, and the carta is where you can still read both.

Sources: Andina on chifa’s emblematic dishes; El Comercio on the soups of the carta. Further reading: Mariella Balbi’s Los chifas en el Perú. Historia y recetas (USMP, 1999), the standard history.

Questions, answered

What should you order at your first chifa?

Three plates cover a first visit: chaufa especial, tallarín saltado and wantán frito, which El Comercio names as the default table order at a chifa. For four people, put a sopa wantán in the middle to share and add one plate with sauce on it that is not fried, kam lu wantán or chi jau kay, so the rice has something to soak up.

What is sopa wantán?

Sopa wantán is the chifa house soup, the most common one on the carta: a broth cooked for several hours, the fideo wantán, and three or four wantanes. Order it as an entrada and it usually arrives without protein; order it as a plato de fondo for the table and it comes loaded with pollo, chancho asado or pato asado.

What is kam lu wantán?

Kam lu wantán is the salty-sweet plate of the chifa carta: wantanes under chancho, pollo and langostinos, with pineapple, holantao, pimiento and cebolla china, crowned with tamarind sauce. Order it when the rest of the table is fried and dry, because it arrives with sauce.

What is the difference between a combinado and an aeropuerto?

A combinado serves arroz chaufa and tallarín saltado together on one plate, side by side. An aeropuerto cooks rice and noodles into each other in the same pan, with pollo, huevo, pimiento, frejol chino and cebolla china. Nobody has settled where the aeropuerto got its name.

Is chifa food gluten-free?

No. Wheat arrives on a chifa carta twice over: the wantán wrappers and the noodles are wheat themselves, and most commercial soy sauce is brewed with wheat too, which matters because sillao, soy sauce, is in nearly everything. Treat a chifa carta as not gluten-free by default.

Want to know when La Salsa drops?

One email when our lomo saltado sauce is ready.

First name Last name

Email address Avísame