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Five years ago, Arturo Bazan immigrated from Peru to California for a fresh start after enduring taxing working conditions at the restaurant he cooked at.
“We worked maybe from 9 a.m. until 2 a.m.,” he said. “I was tired of this style of life.”
Now he is the head chef and co-owner of Callao, a full-service Peruvian restaurant named after the city Bazan grew up in. Callao Peruvian Cuisine opened its doors for dinner service July 15 in Los Altos, replacing Italian restaurant Cafe La Scala. It’s an elevated sister restaurant to Jora, a casual restaurant Bazan and co-founder Juan Carlos Sosaya Carrera opened in December 2019 in San Pedro Square Market in San Jose.
“This is my big dream here in the USA,” Bazan said. “I never think I’d have a restaurant here in Los Altos, California, so I am happy for that.”
Callao will introduce lunch service beginning Thursday and offers classic Peruvian dishes with elevated plating, focusing on high-quality local ingredients. Select produce is sourced from Luna Vez Farm in Los Altos Hills, seafood is from Allen Brothers in San Francisco and chicken is sourced from Mary’s Free Range Chicken.
Find bar snacks like beef empanadas and shrimp tartare, six varieties of ceviche (including a vegetarian option), mains like lomo saltado (a traditional beef stir-fry dish) and arroz con pato (a traditional duck and rice dish), wood-oven rotisserie chicken, and desserts like alfajores de dulce de leche (cookies with caramel) and pionono (Peruvian sponge cake with caramel). Appetizers are priced from $8-$20, ceviche is $19-$28 and mains are $20-$37.
“There’s a lot of passion for the food,” Bazan said. “It’s the passion to try to prepare one good plate for the people. I leave one part of me in each plate.”
The bar program is headed by Andrew Ward, a Los Altos native, and features classics like pisco sours as well as imported Peruvian beers.
Bazan and Sosaya Carrera met in 2019 through a mutual friend, and when Sosaya Carrera was looking for a chef partner for Jora, he reached out to Bazan, who decided to leave Peru to work on the project. The pair had been looking for a location for Callao for a year and a half, with deals falling through in Sunnyvale and Saratoga.
“And this one came out of the blue, and we were like, ‘Los Altos, really?’’” Sosaya Carrera said. “If you’re in Sunnyvale and you have money, you wanna go to Mountain View. If you are in Mountain View and you have money, you want to go to Palo Alto. If you are in Palo Alto and you have more money, you want to go to Los Altos. We’re shortcutting the whole process. Amazing!”
Renovations were completed in just over a month, and the restaurant has five distinct dining experiences: the lounge, the dining room, the front patio, the covered back patio and the private dining room/wine room hybrid. The walls of the covered back patio are now painted in a variety of bright colors, paying homage to the colorful walls of Monumental Callao. The renovations were spearheaded by Pablo Delgado, the third co-owner of Callao and Jora who joined the team a couple of years back and who also owns a construction company.
“We put a lot of love and passion (into Callao),” Delgado said. “It’s not only time. You can spend all day 24 hours here, but if you don’t put passion in what you do, it’s not going to happen the way you want it.”
The owner of the property, Jan Unlu, previously told the Los Altos Town Crier that he intended to transform Cafe La Scala into a four-story, 15-unit condo complex by 2024, but Sosaya Carrera said Callao negotiated a five-year lease with the option to renew or to purchase.
Like Bazan, Sosaya Carrera also grew up in Peru, moving to the Bay Area at 18 years old for college and graduating from San Jose State University with a degree in business administration and finance. When he moved to the U.S., he didn’t have plans to ever open a restaurant.
“I wanted to be an accountant, which I am, but I think my passion for culinary is because I like to eat,” he said.
Sosaya Carrera’s introduction to the restaurant industry began when he took a job at The Four Seasons, starting in expo and working his way up to the accounting department.
“What motivates me about the restaurant industry is the one moment that we get when somebody is trying something new,” he said. “They go and they have the first bite and they go ‘Mmm.’ It reminds them of some childhood memories, or a sense or a (comforting) taste.”
Sosaya Carrera met Delgado, who is originally from Argentina and has a background in tech and construction, almost 20 years ago while playing soccer with mutual friends.
“(Sosaya Carrera) introduced us to Peruvian food, and I said, ‘Wow, there’s just a lot of flavor,’” Delgado said.
Sosaya Carrera said Peruvian food takes influence from Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Italian food, and he wants to show the local community flavors they’ve never tasted before.
“We want to introduce a new culture, Peruvian culture,” he said. “(Peruvian food) is like a melting pot in food. Something colorful, delicious, but also new to them.”
Callao Peruvian Cuisine, 376 1st St., Los Altos; 650-917-0300, Instagram: @callao_peruviancuisine. Open Monday to Saturday 5-10 p.m. and Sunday 5:30-10 p.m. Lunch begins Thursday and will be offered daily 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
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