Ecuadorean Eats

Delicious street food is par for the course in Quito. But over the past 10 years, an exciting gourmet food scene has emerged in Ecuador’s capital city as its top chefs work to develop a national cuisine from scratch.

By Lola Augustine Brown

On a bustling street in Quito’s hip and artsy La Floresta neighborhood, a parked silver Toyota Yaris is decorated with handmade signs advertising tamales, empanadas and colada morada. An arrow on one of them points toward an ancient-looking wooden garage door.

Quito’s Metropolitan Cathedral, with Panecillo Hill in the background

“What’s that about?” I ask our guide.

“Ah! It’s a huaca,” he says with a big grin. “That’s what we call a good place to eat. The kind you take your friends to, that gets customers through word of mouth.”

“But where is it?” I ask, looking around. He rings a buzzer on an intercom next to the garage. After an animated conversation with a fuzzy voice on the other end, he explains to us that our food was being made in an upstairs apartment, and they would bring it down soon.

Five minutes later, a man appears bearing a tray laden with Styrofoam cups of local specialty colada morada (a thick, boiled-down fruit drink made with corn), along with tender yuca bread rolls and cornmeal raisin cakes. We pay him and devour everything right there on the sidewalk.

Our next stop is an eatery called Los Antojitos, where we find a man cooking on a grill in what appears to be a narrow entrance to an upstairs apartment. We line up for bowls of a traditional pork, potato and peanut stew, into which we ladle chili sauce. Messy and spicy, it’s a perfect spot for lunch on the run and a complete contrast to the 10-course tasting menu at Tributo, where we head next.

I’d been invited to Quito to explore the fledgling gourmet food scene, tagging along with notable chefs from Latin America and Spain. Every meal introduced me to a vast range of new-to-me ingredients gathered from the Andes mountains, the Amazon jungle, the Pacific coast and the Galápagos Islands. It was a mind-blowing week, and Ecuador was unlike any country I’ve visited.

Locro de papa, a traditional potato soup from San Ignacio Restaurant

Creating A Cuisine

Ten years ago, Ecuador didn’t have much in the way of fine dining, explains Aura Restaurant chef Quique Sempere, who is also a judge on MasterChef Ecuador and honed his culinary skills in Spain before bringing his techniques home. “People here were used to big plates of food sold cheap. When I started serving small, artfully presented plates, it took a while for them to understand the concept,” he says. Now the city offers a raft of restaurants headed by ambitious, hugely talented chefs.

When chef Luis Maldonado started his nose-totail beef restaurant, Tributo, just over a year ago, it was a hard slog at first. Everyone kept telling him that Ecuadoreans were not really into beef, and dry-aging was a new concept entirely. “At the beginning, I was selling one coffee a day, and most of the time I was buying it,” he laughs. “I’ve had to change people’s minds as well as their stomachs.”

100-day dry-aged beef “sushi” at Tributo restaurant

Another of Quito’s star chefs is Alejandro Chamorro, who owns Nuema—listed as one of Latin America’s 50 best restaurants—with his equally impressive pastry chef wife Pía Salazar. Chamorro worked under acclaimed chefs in Peru and completed a stint at Noma in Copenhagen before returning home to share his craft. “We are the first generation of chefs in Ecuador to work on the national identity of our food. It’s been a tough path, trying to make people understand what we are trying to say, but now people are traveling to Quito for our restaurants and seeing that we have a lot to offer,” says Chamorro.

So what exactly is Ecuadorean cuisine? While there’s no official national dish, pork features heavily on menus from fine dining to street vendors, even though cuy (guinea pig) is what many people think of when it comes to Ecuadorean cuisine. Chamarro says it all comes down to the ingredients on hand. “Ecuador is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. That’s an advantage but also a handicap. We have so much to work with, but we also have to be clever when choosing what to work with,” he says. “For me, the true luxury of being in Ecuador is that perhaps you will try things that you’ve never tried before, and will perhaps never try again in your life.”

This was certainly true for me. Before traveling to Ecuador I’d never heard of my new favorite fruit, the naranjilla. It’s orange, resembles a tomato and has a tart, sweet flavor. Over the course of my week there, I try it as an ice cream flavor, as juice, and incorporated into many of the dishes I sampled at restaurants. Another new-to-me food was coca tea, a traditional remedy for altitude sickness, which I embraced willingly during my first three days in the city, waiting for my body to adjust.

Naranjilla, a popular South American citrus fruit

Tradition Made New

Many of the ingredients listed on Ecuadorean menus have been used in the country since pre-Columbian times. The region was conquered by the Incas in the early 1520s, only to be colonized by the Spanish about a decade later, and finally gained independence in 1830. All of this left a huge influence on Ecuadorean cuisine; every chef I speak with expresses their desire to respect these ingredients, as well as the culture and sometimes mysticism around them. These ingredients are transformed into dishes as modern and innovative as you’d find in any major food city, with beautiful dining rooms and intimate experiences to match.

Chef Daniel Maldonado,owner of Urko restaurant

Daniel Maldonado started Urko eight years ago and says he was the first chef to offer a local concept tasting menu in the city. Situated on a huge patio that’s actually the backyard of his home, Urko is filled with art pieces depicting shamans and ancient rituals, plants, and huge jars of whatever he is fermenting at the time. The vibe is casual, with family-style dining, but the food is decidedly elevated. His menus take you on a journey through the different regions of Ecuador, and each dish is a showstopper. A sample menu: oysters with crème fraîche and passion fruit granita, late summer squash with fried quinoa and macadamia sauce, Amazonian paiche fish with potato foam set on a bed of lacto-fermented tomato gel, with a finale of chocolate and tea for the final course.

A chocolate tasting is a sweet way to conclude a fine dining experience at Urko.

Nuema offers a modern dining experience in an airy atrium-style room in a historic building that was once the Haitian embassy. There’s a stylish cocktail bar and a gallery showcasing the work of young artists upstairs. The attention to detail in every dish is outstanding, and the flavors are intricately layered. For example, the sea bass arrives topped with a spicy guava paste on a bed of jicama root, 36-hour-cooked suckling pig with a colada morada sauce, and one of the most interesting and delicious dishes of my trip: a dessert of Galápagos seaweed with coconut sauce and black garlic.

You’ll find more sophisticated dining at Cardo, which has a fairy-garden-like backyard growing berries and herbs. All five courses I eat are exceptional, but the corn cake pork with crispy chicharrón on a bed of hominy and the lamb with dark chocolate and salt are both incredible. In Aura’s trendy dining room, I finally try cuy in the form of spring rolls with black garlic sauce, along with dry goat stew topped with arancini. “I’m inserting new techniques into traditional Ecuadorean cuisine because traditionally it just isn’t that pretty,” explains Sempere.

Fried plantains meet potajede frijoles, traditional Ecuadorean food

Locals may have scoffed at the small-plates concept a decade ago, but today, reservations at these restaurants (and others) are hot tickets indeed. I love the contrast between the hearty, old-school traditional restaurants like Cosas Finas de la Florida dishing up huge portions of grilled pork, potatoes and plantain with tangy salsas, and the exciting, risk-taking newer places. It’s rare to visit a destination and report that every meal you had was great, but this was certainly my experience in Quito. The city’s gastronomic potential is on an upward trend as it takes its well-earned place as a top culinary destination.