The old cuisines are the best. Leave people in the same general place for a thousand years or more, and they’ll figure out what’s good to eat. Migration and fusion add something to food, of course, but there’s no substitute for a millennium of culinary experiment, and that’s what attracts New American chefs to Santa Fe and fusionists to Chinese and Indian food, and even what provides some of the underlying savor of Italian food.

Peru has had high civilizations as long as anywhere has. Besides bringing us the potato (and quinoa), the country had a lot to do with the development of chili peppers, peanuts, squashes, beans, and corn. Add a Spanish colonial history, immigrant populations from Asia and Europe, and a few Afro-Peruvians, and you have quite a cuisine in Lima, and some very tasty food at Machu Picchu, a 15-table storefront in Somerville.

Of course, not everything Peruvian is immediately delicious to outsiders. I watched a table of well-intended gringos struggling with Inca Kola ($1/can; $1.50/bottle), a bright yellow soda that (as I recall it in Peru) tastes a lot like the old Fleer’s Double Bubble gum. The advertising slogan for Inca Kola in Peru in the 1980s was "Es nuestra!" ("It is ours"). I always suspected that slogan reflected a certain pride in the fact that non-Peruvians didn’t like it, similar to the way some New Englanders feel about Moxie.

On the other hand, no one from anywhere will have a problem with papa a la huancaina ($6), here presented as an appetizer of two boiled potatoes, halved, with an intriguing cheese sauce just touched up with hot pepper, a hard-boiled egg, and some olives. It’s potato heaven. Ocopa ($6) is a similar dish in creamy basil sauce, also slightly hot. Peruvians have a different cast of chili peppers than those developed in Mexico, and I suspect the rather hot but delicious aji amarillo in use here, with some of the richer, less-spicy rocotillo chili later in the meal. If you want something really hot, the waiter will bring a little dish of fresh orange-pink salsa that is close to habañero intensity, probably fresh amarillos. Despite the cuisine’s long acquaintance with chilies, much Peruvian food is mountain food — meat and potatoes — and not heavily spiced.

Another no-problem appetizer is salchipapa ($6), a platter of French fries and mini sausages. On the startlingly authentic level, there is choclo peruano con queso ($5), built around an ear of eight-row white dent corn. I can’t imagine how they got a fresh choclo into the United States, so it must be grown somewhere domestically, perhaps in California. It’s not a very sweet corn, but the giant kernels make it very interesting to eat, and it’s served here with a rubbery, salty cheese, as it might be in Peru.

My favorite entrée was ceviche mixto ($12), consisting of raw, lime-juice-marinated squid, octopus, shrimp, conch, and sea scallops, just flecked with fresh cilantro and chili, and garnished with a slice of choclo, a slice of sweet potato, and a slice of white potato. The key to ceviche is timing — marinate too long and the fish or seafood gets hard; too little and there is little flavor.

I also admired the restaurant’s aji de gallina ($9), a boneless-chicken stew I used to make. Think chicken à la king, with a perfect hint of hot pepper, over rice. There was nothing but pleasure with either of our entrées. Pescado a la chorrillana ($12) is fried white fish, perhaps pollack, with creole tomato-onion sauce (maybe a rocatillo or two) and oven-fried potato chunks. Bistec a lo pobre ($13) turned out to be an oddly tender cut of steak at these prices, with semisweet plantain and great oily white rice.

Machu Picchu has Argentine wines, but we stuck with Cuzqueña beer ($3), a light cold pilsner from Cusco, not far from the actual Machu Picchu. I wondered if beer brewed at such a high altitude would have more or fewer bubbles than usual near sea level, but in this instance it was about as carbonated as any other bottled beer.

Desserts all cost around $3, and some are novel and fun. We had a combination special ($6) of mazamorra morada ($3 by itself) and arroz con leche ($3), the latter being hot rice pudding. The former, which made a perfect sauce for rice pudding, is a jelly made from a special fine-grain purple corn, enriched with prunes, raisins, and a subtle hint of clove. Budin ($3) is a solid lump of bread pudding in a honeyed syrup, almost like a Middle Eastern dessert. The Iberian-Arab connection is evident in the name alcochofas ($6), a whole box of heart-shaped sandwich cookies stuffed with dulce de leche (caramelized condensed milk). Maybe these were just a special for Valentine’s Day.

Machu Picchu looks like many immigrant restaurants: a storefront with hard tiles, mock-stucco tan walls, and a few souvenirs and posters hanging on the wall. The background music was distinctly pop, however; not a panpipe to be heard. Evidently the cumbia, bolero, and even meringue have reached Peru. The atmosphere is terrific, as Boston’s small Peruvian community and their friends have discovered the place, and it’s full of people who are nostalgic, curious, or attuned to its diversity. Service is pleasant, fluently multilingual, and explanatory as needed.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.