National Geographic Traveller (UK)
Eat: Quito
Discover how the high-altitude Ecuadorian capital is upping its culinary ante
While Quito is a superlative spot for an education in Ecuador’s blossoming culinary scene, I hadn’t expected to find myself actually spending the day at school. “For many years, this was a kindergarten,” says
Santiago Rosero, one of the pioneers behind Fermento. Part-cooking cooperative, partbar, the project hosts a rotating lineup of chefs in the old classrooms, with tables and chairs arranged in the former playground.
Located in the not-so-trendy La Vicentina neighbourhood, at the front of the space there’s a small organic market, which leads through to the old school. I order an Ecuadorian IPA while we talk, with an artisanal blue cheese burger on the way. A short walk away, in the Plaza José Navarro, 30 or so people are queuing up for street food: tripa mishqui (barbecued tripe) and deep-fried empanadas. The scene stands in sharp contrast to the cutting-edge cool of Fermento. Is any of this for them? Santiago seems to know what I’m going to ask next.
“Look, I don’t want to be part of the gentrification here,” he says. “I want to be part of this neighbourhood. In the future, hopefully we’ll have food festivals to involve more of the local businesses. For now, everything is promoted boca a boca — by word of mouth only.”
Fermento would be a remarkable project in any city at any time, but it seems truly extraordinary in Quito — especially when Santiago tells me it was launched immediately after the city’s initial lockdown ended in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He’d never have chosen it this way, but the virus and the business are now inseparable.
“I don’t want to get too carried away or overstate it, but what we did was kind of heroic,” he says. “To stand and fight in the middle of this crazy moment.”
I take a bite of the burger and don’t disagree for a second. “We were born while a lot of people were dying.”
The tentacles of the disease still spread through Quito, but it was impossible to ignore just how much the city is thriving. There are trendy cafes charging as much for a flat white as other places are for an almuerzo, the popular three-course set-menu lunches found across this corner of the continent.
The value of putting Ecuador’s astonishing larder to the fore has also been recognised — up here, high in the Andes, the capital has made a real effort to resist Americanisation compared to its coastal rival Guayaquil.
Even at the top end of the capital’s dining scene, there’s been a move towards something more indigenous — drawing on a mind-boggling array of local ingredients that includes recently rediscovered varieties of ancient grains, myriad endemic root veg, maize and fruits for which we’d struggle to find English names, not to mention Ecuador’s prized quinoa and avocados.
“We’re a fairly small country with a lot of diversity — from the Galápagos to the mountains here and the coast and, of course, a lot of seafood. We also have the Amazon,” explains chef Emilio Dalmau inside Casa Gangotena. The grand hotel has been here in one form or another for centuries and its kitchen has long been at the highest end of Quiteño cuisine. While it isn’t priced with locals in mind, the head chef insists the menus reflected the nation. “Our cuisine is like that, a mix of the traditions of the people from all over Ecuador as well as our ancestors. One of the dishes on the menu is locro de papas, a soup made with three types of potato and local spices.”
Rudimentary though it may be, locro is ever-present at this formal, Frenchinfluenced restaurant, but also at some of the plastic-chair, cheek-by-jowl joints in other neighbourhoods around Quito.
“Every six months, we search the country again and try to find new things from Ecuador,” continues the chef. “Go back 10 or 15 years, all the fine-dining cuisine here in Quito was French or Italian. Those are lovely, of course, but there were no goodquality local options. Now I think there’s a generation trying to make very good food based on the recipes of our grandmothers.”
Leading this rustic renaissance are such organisations as Quito’s Canopy Bridge, a nonprofit network that connects indigenous farmers with food suppliers, who in turn provide many of the ingredients found in Quito’s high-end restaurants. Over in the La
Carolina neighbourhood, Somos is another of the fancier food addresses in town. It’s the sort of place that would surely catch the eye of Michelin, if the guide ever deigned to cast an eye in this direction (an oversight that includes Ecuador’s continued omission from The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list; the country only recently made its Latin America list, with a single inclusion for chef Alejandro Chamorro’s Quito restaurant, Nuema). Then the pandemic hit and Somos’ entire business model seemed dangerously irrelevant. Rather than sit back and wait for things to get better, chef Alejandra Espinoza and husband Signo Uddenberg simply created something new.
“With Covid-19, we never know how many people would come in, so we launched La Guaguasería,” says the chef as we sit down to a kaleidoscopic array of dishes from her newly evolved menu. The titular guaguasa, a flatbread named after the Quechua word for ‘small child’, is stuffed with Alejandra’s favourite Ecuadorian dish, seco de pollo— chicken cooked with orange and beer. A celebrated staple of the Day of the Dead festivities, in some early iteration of the restaurant, guaguasa was supposed to be one of the only dishes offered, but now in front of me there’s also a colourful poke-like salad bowl of camote (sweet potato), a rainbow of empanadas and a way-better-than-it-sounds dish of guinea pig dumplings.
“By June, we knew the pandemic wasn’t going to be over any time soon and we didn’t want to lose our flow of clients, or for them to forget us,” says the chef, who had to let twothirds of her staff go due to the economic downturn. “This was an idea we wanted to do in the future, so we moved it forward. It’s less elaborate, so we can operate with fewer staff.”
They aim to bring back the high-end restaurant in 2021, but La Guaguasería has proven so popular it’s already earned a future in some guise — perhaps in the basement of the current property. The big draw at the moment is a sprawling brunch on weekends — that and a striking indoor mural that hangs over the bar where some of Quito’s most inventive cocktails are created; most notable is the miske margarita (made from Ecuador’s much-overlooked answer to tequila). “We’ll see what happens,” says Alejandra. “For now, I just keep trying new things. If I don’t do something, I’ll go nuts!”