What to eat in Quito
Ecuadorian food does not travel the way Peruvian or Mexican food has, which means most visitors arrive with no expectations at all. That is the best possible way to arrive. Here is what to order, where that sort of place is, and the one thing to understand before your first lunch.
The short version
- Learn the word almuerzo. It is a three-course lunch for a few dollars and it is the best value in the country.
- Lunch is the main meal. Dinner is lighter and earlier than you are used to.
- Go gently on your first night: heavy food and altitude sleep badly together.
- The markets are where the good food is, and they close in the afternoon.
- Try the fruit. You will not recognise half of it.
Start here: the almuerzo
Between roughly noon and three, most small restaurants stop offering a menu and offer one thing: the almuerzo. A soup, a main course with rice, a fresh juice, and often a small dessert, for somewhere between three and six dollars.
There is no choosing and there is rarely anything written down. You sit, someone tells you what today's is, and it arrives. It is how the country eats lunch, it is fresh because they cook what they will sell that day, and it is the single easiest way to eat well here on very little money.
Look for handwritten signs saying almuerzo with a price. If the place is full of people on their lunch break, that is your answer.
The twelve to order
Soups, which Ecuador takes seriously
1 · Locro de papa. The one to try first. A thick potato soup with cheese, crowned with avocado, and better than that description suggests. Comforting at altitude and gentle on a first day.
2 · Caldo de gallina. Hen broth, long-simmered, served with a piece of the bird. Eaten for breakfast, for hangovers, and for cold mornings, which in Quito is most of them.
3 · Encebollado. Fish soup with albacore, cassava and pickled red onion, with lime and plantain chips crumbled on top. Coastal in origin, national in status, and widely held to be the country's finest hangover cure.
Pork, which Quito takes even more seriously
4 · Hornado. Whole pig slow-roasted overnight, carved to order, served with mote, potatoes and a sharp agrio sauce. This is market food and market is where it is best — the woman with the biggest queue is the one to join. Enormous. Not a first-night dish.
5 · Fritada. Pork simmered then fried in its own fat, with plantain, mote and corn. Salty, rich, and traditionally a weekend thing.
6 · Llapingachos. Potato and cheese patties, griddled, served with peanut sauce, chorizo, a fried egg and avocado. Order these if you order nothing else on this list.
Stews and mains
7 · Seco de chivo. Goat stewed slowly with naranjilla and beer until it falls apart, with rice and fried plantain. Sometimes made with chicken instead, which is milder.
8 · Ceviche ecuatoriano. Not the Peruvian version. Ecuadorian shrimp ceviche comes in a tomato-based liquid, cooked rather than raw, served cold with popcorn and plantain chips to add yourself. Different, and worth trying on its own terms.
Corn, in its many forms
9 · Humitas and quimbolitos. Steamed in leaves: humitas savoury with fresh corn and cheese, quimbolitos sweet and cake-like. Breakfast, or afternoon with coffee.
10 · Choclo con queso. Andean corn, enormous chewy kernels nothing like the sweetcorn you know, with a slab of fresh cheese. Sold everywhere, costs almost nothing.
Street and snack
11 · Empanadas de viento. "Wind empanadas" — puffed, cheese-filled, dusted with sugar. The sweet-and-salty combination sounds wrong and is not.
12 · Bolón de verde. A ball of mashed green plantain with cheese or crackling, fried, eaten for breakfast with coffee. Dense enough to hold you until the afternoon.
Where to actually eat
- Markets — the best hornado, the best fruit, the best value, and a proper look at how the city eats. Go at lunchtime; most wind down by mid-afternoon.
- Almuerzo places — small, plain, full at one o'clock. Follow the office workers.
- The Old Town's restored streets — pleasant, more expensive, aimed at visitors. Fine for an evening, not where you will eat the best hornado.
- San Blas and Calle Antepara — a dense run of restaurants and bars a few minutes from our door, and where we send people who want to eat well without a taxi.
- Ask us. Places open and close, and reception knows which ones are good this month. That is a better system than a list on a website.
What to drink
Canelazo — hot, sweet, cinnamon and naranjilla, with a shot of sugarcane spirit. The reason people can stand around outside in the evening at 2,850 m. Save it for your second night.
Fresh juice — every almuerzo comes with one, and it will be a fruit you cannot name. Mora, tomate de árbol, naranjilla, guanábana, taxo. Ask for it en agua unless you want it made with milk.
Coffee — Ecuador grows excellent coffee and exports almost all of it, so historically the local habit was instant. That has changed fast in Quito, and there are now serious cafés roasting Ecuadorian beans. Take some home; it is a fraction of what you would pay for it abroad.
Chocolate — Ecuadorian cacao is among the best in the world. Buy bars here rather than at the airport, and certainly rather than in the Galápagos, where everything has been shipped from the mainland at a markup.
The fruit
Go to a market and buy one of everything you do not recognise. It will cost a few dollars and it is the most memorable thirty minutes of eating available in this city.
- Naranjilla — sour, green, mostly drunk as juice
- Tomate de árbol — tree tomato, tart, superb as juice
- Taxo — banana passionfruit, floral
- Guanábana — soursop, creamy and strange
- Pitahaya — the yellow Ecuadorian dragon fruit, far better than the pink kind
- Babaco, granadilla, uvilla, mora — ask the vendor how to eat them; they will show you
If your timing is lucky
Fanesca, during Holy Week only. A dense soup of twelve grains and beans with salt cod, served with fried plantain, empanadas and boiled egg. Every family makes it differently, every family believes theirs is correct, and it exists for about two weeks a year.
Colada morada and guaguas de pan, around the start of November for Día de los Difuntos. A hot purple drink of black corn flour, berries and spices, drunk with bread shaped and painted as swaddled infants. The tradition long predates the Spanish. If you are here at the beginning of November, this is not optional.
About cuy
Guinea pig, roasted whole on a spit, is a genuine Andean tradition — a festival food, domesticated for this purpose for thousands of years, and eaten with real ceremony. It arrives looking exactly like what it is.
Some visitors want to try it and should. Others find it upsetting, particularly if the animal was a childhood pet. Both reactions are fine and neither needs defending. If you do want it, it is easier to find outside the city, and it is usually ordered in advance.
Practical notes
- Do not eat a huge dinner on your first night. Digestion and altitude compete, and a plate of hornado at nine will cost you sleep you cannot afford before a dawn flight.
- Lunch is the main meal. Restaurants often close between lunch and dinner, and dinner is earlier and lighter than in Europe or North America.
- Ají — the chilli sauce on the table is usually mild and always worth trying.
- Water — drink bottled or filtered. Ice in established places is fine. See the practicalities page.
- Cash, in small bills. Markets and almuerzo places do not take cards.
- Vegetarians manage, with effort — locro, humitas, llapingachos without the chorizo, and superb fruit. "Sin carne" sometimes still arrives with chicken; "soy vegetariano, nada de carne ni pollo ni pescado" works better. Vegans should plan ahead.
- Tipping — a 10% service charge is usually already on the bill. See money and tipping.
What we do here
Breakfast is where we put the local food in front of you without you having to find it — fruit you have not met, fresh juice, and the things people actually eat in the morning. Ask at reception for where to go for lunch: we keep a mental list that changes as places come and go, and we will send you to the market rather than to the tourist street if that is what you want.
And if you are flying to the islands in the morning, tell us the night before. Breakfast can be ready before 04:30 — see the Galápagos flight guide.
Ask at breakfast where to have lunch
Nine rooms in a restored 1914 house, with a front desk that eats in this neighbourhood every day. Book direct for our lowest rate — and arrive hungry.
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Useful at a market stall when you cannot remember what the purple one was called.
