Claudia Fernández is the chef and the heart of El Inka Peruvian Cuisine. She specializes in traditional Peruvian “Criolla” style gastronomy. Her journey started in her native Escuintla, in Guatemala, where she helped her “abuelita (grandma)” in the kitchen and nurtured her love of cooking. But she stepped away from cooking for a while to study education before moving to California in 1990.
Luis Cabrera is a native of Ayacucho, in the Republic of Perú. Luis studied journalism and came to the US in the late 1980s while he was working for Peru’s signature soda Inka Kola. One day, Luis friend Rocco invited him to a dinner party. There he met a “pretty shy and quiet” girl who had just moved to the area. Her name was Claudia.
Out of love for Luis, Claudia started learning everything she could about Peruvian food from books, cooking shows, and her new Peruvian family. But, at the time, both Claudia and Luis were working toward different career goals.
Luis worked with several newspapers, and later started an auto insurance franchise and an event company. Around the same time, he got involved in Latino community associations advocating for equal protections for Latino entrepreneurs and workers.
Claudia, on the other hand, was working with youth with intellectual or developmental disabilities for Social Vocational Services. She also joined Luis at the La Gaceta newspaper, where she became a very successful advertising salesperson. During this busy time, they also welcomed a son, Mark, and a daughter, Marilis, to the family.
Claudia’s passion for Peruvian cuisine kept growing and eventually led her to take over the cooking for the whole extended family. Soon, she was catering events and selling her signature “pollo a la brasa” at a friend’s market while dreaming about having her own restaurant.
That dream led them to Oregon and El Inka Peruvian Cuisine opened its doors in Gresham. The restaurant was a hit, earning lines of customers out the door and articles in publications including the Oregonian, Portland Monthly, and Willamette Week.
But everyone in the restaurant business knows how brutally hard it can be and success came at a price for Claudia. In 2016, she started to feel unwell. She powered through early symptoms, but by 2018 she was diagnosed with kidney disease and diabetes, while also dealing with stress related depression. She wanted to keep working, but her family intervened, and El Inka closed in 2018.
Claudia returned to education work. But as her health improved, she realized that wasn’t the path she wanted to take. “Just like an athlete’s love for his sport, a good chef loves cooking,” says Luis.
Slowly, she started to shift back to professional cooking. She started back her catering business using commercial kitchens. And in 2020, El Inka Peruvian Cuisine reopened in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s a symbol of what I have lived and all that I had to overcome,” Claudia says. “But like the fable says, it is better to go slow like the turtle, and not fast and careless like the hare.” After more than 30 years together, El Inka Peruvian Cuisine has become a symbol of Claudia and Luis’s triumph and their love.
