Pio Pio: Better Than The Other Food

from Epifurious.com

...Pio Pio is a Peruvian pollo a la brasa restaurant of such exceeding amazingness that I couldn't bear to even throw away the menu, let alone imagine a future without perfectly prepared roast chicken, french fries, red beans, rice, tostones. It seemed a bleak, colorless existence. So it remains, sitting on top of my fridge with the bus schedule and the pot holders.

Let me explain...

...The sangria is boozy and full of cubed apples and orange slices. You feel warm, and the winking lights of the restaurant bathe you in flattering, sultry light. From somewhere else in the restaurant, a Peruvian band plays music that would irritate you on a subway platform, but here seems just right. The conversation swirls, intimate, vertiginously returning again and again to the food itself. Everyone is smiling, you are full, you can't stop eating. You are drunk--on sangria, on food, on the atmosphere. You wonder why everyone doesn't eat here every night. You wonder why YOU don't eat here every night...

...For those enticed: It is at the corner of 85th Street and Northern Blvd., in Jackson Heights...