An ode to the menu del dia
Throwing ourselves into Ecuador with shrunken heads, fabulous hats, and a solid Friday night curry.
A new country unlocked and with it a fabulous new range of hats. In Peru, each individual region’s culture can be identified by a different style of clothing and hats, particularly among the women, who wear layers upon layers of brightly coloured fabrics and hats of all different shapes and sizes.
For Andean people, a hat is a marker of community and tradition, but also social class, age and profession. More often than not, the wearer’s hat is handmade by his or herself (and in Quechua communities, hat weaving and knitting are very much seen as a male activities) in keeping with their local community’s unique style. And the styles vary wildly. In Cabanaconde, we saw lots of women with wide-brimmed straw hats that were predominantly white with delicate colourful embroidery. In the mountains around Huaraz, tiny elderly ladies wore fabric artfully pinned into a tented dome, and in northern Peru the hats became much taller, darker, and balanced on the very top of the wearers’ heads.
I’m delighted to discover the same is true in Ecuador. Many local people (and especially older generations) wear their traditional hats to travel in, so I’ve spent plenty of hours on buses admiring the tall felt hats worn by ladies around Loja in the south (a little like a rounded top hat) – and the shorter trilby-style felt hats with feathers worn around Cuenca and Quito. Something I didn’t know until this week is that Panamas – the pale straw sun hats much beloved by 1940s heartthrobs like Humphrey Bogart and 2020s expat dads alike) are in fact an Ecuadorian creation and have no link to Panama. They are actually made in Cuenca, as Dave and I witnessed at the charmingly eccentric Museo del Sombrero this week.
Our journey across the border into Ecuador on Tuesday night was relatively smooth, all things considered. The only bus northbound from Piura (our final stop in northern Peru) departed at 9.30pm and pulled up outside border control at around one in the morning, so the timings didn’t lend themselves to getting much sleep, but unlike every other crossing we’ve made during this trip there were zero queues. In fact, we and the handful of Peruvians on our bus were the only ones there at all, asides from two sleepy looking customs officers.
Brief explainer time: Ecuador has become increasingly unstable in the past few months. Supposedly, it’s a problem that’s grown since the pandemic, which had a devastating effect on the country’s economy (as was the case almost everywhere in South America) and led to a big spike in gang crime and violence relating to drug trafficking from Colombia.
The murder rate is generally high, but it’s a particularly bad time to be a political leader in Ecuador: dozens have been murdered in the past few months, including anti-corruption presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, who was assassinated in Quito last year while campaigning. As of 1 May, a state of emergency has been declared across five Ecuadorian states, and foreign travel is advised against in these areas, understandably. But, at this moment, the central (Andean) region around Quito, the Galápagos Islands, and the south east of the country is deemed safe, and so here we are.
This is all a long way of explaining why we’ve been travelling up through the northern centre of Peru, via Piura, crossing over into Ecuador at Marcara, rather than attempting to cross nearer the coast through Huaquillas, as would be the more sensical backpacking route in ordinary political times.
Because of the current crisis, tourists crossing into Ecuador from Peru or Colombia are required to either present their own criminal record check or consent to border control conducting a check via Interpol, something we learned but a few hours before crossing via the UK foreign office website. Dave was nervous but I felt confident that no Ecuadorian border police would have a problem with us, given that we were white idiot tourists and they have bigger fish to fry.
As it happened, I was right as always and we were able to fill in a form to consent to our being Interpolled that would almost certainly end up in the recycling bin later that day. The only minor glitch was when Dave was asked (in Spanish) if I was his partner and he confidently replied that he was “33 years old”. The Spanish lessons continue.
As it turned out, it wasn’t the interruption for immigration that killed any chance of sleep that night but the bum-clenching speed at which our driver raced us through the winding mountain roads up to altitude. We staggered into Loja early at 4:50am, but in a twist of fate our kindly Airbnb host was already awake (everyone in this part of the world seems to wake up before dawn) and messaged us to say we could check in as soon as 5:30am – what a hero. The day began again in earnest around lunchtime, after we’d caught up on some sleep.
I should add before our eldest fans start panicking that everywhere we’ve been so far in Ecuador has felt nothing but calm and safe, albeit with a heavier-than-normal police presence. We are keeping an eye on the foreign office advice, of course.
Forget narcos, the thing I’d been worried about for Ecuador was that it would feel like Norway or Switzerland after the dirt cheap prices we enjoyed for so long in Peru. Ecuador has been using US dollars as its official currency since the turn of the millennium (during an even deeper financial crisis) and in my experience that always brings up the prices of things. But the first restaurant we stumbled upon (Casa de Miriam46, catchy!) in Loja offered a menu del dia for just $3.50 despite looking fancy as hell – only a few pence more than what we’d paid in Peru – and I knew then everything was going to be just fine.
Allow me to dedicate some space here to the humble menu del dia. It’s the daily deal, a “dish of the day” kind of offering – you know the concept. But here in Latin America these lovely three words mean so much more than the prix fixe menu you might see at home. The menu del dia is an institution: it is the main meal of the day, certainly for Andean countries, and it is cheap, hearty and massive: designed to fill up labourers before their afternoon shift, but enjoyed by families and officer workers alike.
Dave and I first got hooked in Chile, where prices felt shocking after economic crisis-ridden Argentina, and we quickly learned that the best and cheapest way to eat was to have a big lunch in the afternoon and snacks at night for dinner. Even in gringo-centric San Pedro de Atacama, menu del dias proved to be good value and always came with a decent side of veg. In Brazil, we got waylaid with the infamous lunchtime buffets – a whole different kettle of fish – but Peru brought us back into the game.
Peruvian menu del dias are decidedly more rustic in their nature than those we had in Chile, or indeed Brazil’s lunchtime buffets. Any typical high street or mercado central will have dozens and dozens of small and starkly-lit restaurants with a board outside offering almost the exactly same menu for the same price. It’s laughable sometimes just how many places are competing on the same stretch – I can only assume that locals get to know which proprietor serves the best sopa on the street, or perhaps it’s more a case of being loyal to the ones you know or owe the most.
The crucial first step is to get over any initial squeamishness about what the meal might involve. In Peru, especially in the mountains, the starter will most likely be a chicken soup complete with a whole foot, neck or gizzards if you’re lucky. If the menu del dia is a particularly cheap one (the best we’ve seen is six soles – just over £1 for two courses) you might not get a choice about the chicken foot, but if you’re paying a bit more (10 or 11 soles was our usual price point), options might extend to include a corn or quinoa salad, tamales (meat or vegetables cooked in a corn dumpling wrapped in banana leaves) or ceviche (always the best) if you’re near the coast.
It’s just as likely that your main course will arrive at the same time as, or even before, your starter, as waiting staff dole out meals to impatient locals quickly and en masse. Again, choices of main typically vary depending on the region, but we’ve had a lot of chicken milanesas on piles of pesto tagliatelle; rice dishes with fish, chicken or beef (usually the cheap cuts, but still delicious), potatoes aji de gallo style with fish, chicken or beef… you get the idea. Importantly, the dishes are always huge – ridiculously so, disgustingly so, we’re talking about 250 grams of pasta each – and, in Peru, they always come with an unlimited refill of corn juice which varies wildly in levels of solidity and fermentation.
Save for one overcooked chicken thigh and a few particularly lumpy corn juices, every meal we’ve had has been reliably delicious, filling, and served within minutes of ordering. It’s a godsend for days when we have to get a bus somewhere and our eyes are on the clock, but there are just as many days when we have to tear ourselves away from the telenovela reliably playing on loud on a big screen at the front of the restaurant.
Ecuador, it seems so far, is upping the game in terms of quality, if not on size of the menu del dia plates on offer (no bad thing). For our Ecuadorian first meal on Wednesday, I had a creamy vegetable soup followed by shrimp tacos and rice, followed by a tiny bowl of strawberries and cream, served with fresh berry juice, all for $3.50. Perfection. And, this just in from Quito: we’ve spotted some menus for as little as $1.25. Madness.
It’s still strange handing over dollar bills in place of soles and pesos, but after a little adjusting the prices in Ecuador are still clearly very affordable for western budgets. Our accommodation has been around the same price as Peru – and our place in Quito, where I’m writing this week’s newsletter from is perhaps the most beautiful we’ve stayed at, and well under budget at £19 a night. It’s a very striking historic building that looks a little like a former monastery or something, but with bright and arty interiors and (importantly) a modern bathroom and kitchen. I think I could live here –the photos in the listing don’t do it justice.
And yet every country we’ve been to throws up at least one item that’s inexplicably ludicrous in price. Here, annoyingly, it’s contact lens solution: today I was quoted $25 for a 300ml bottle!? I’ve taken the extreme measure of temporarily wearing my glasses in public out of shock.
From Loja we moved on to Cuenca for two nights – an incredibly beautiful and vibing city. I fell instantly in love with the architecture and the huge number of cool bars and cafés dotted all around the centre. On Friday night, groggy from the bus, Dave and I passed an Indian restaurant (no common thing) and decided that was exactly what we fancied, Brits that we are.
That night, the main square was heaving with people – and a significant police presence, given the state of things – but the atmosphere was nothing but friendly and jovial, with families gathering to watch weird puppet shows and posing with men dressed up as giant guinea pigs, apparently something to do with Corpus Christi (still, one week on!) – quite different to the routine and miserable Corpus Christi masses I’d be subjected to as a child.
And wow, do Cuencans like to party. Not quite Brazilian levels, but we didn’t get a lot of sleep, even on our quieter road out of the main centre. Still, it’s a nice change after being in so many smaller north-Peruvian towns where most things seem to wrap up well before 9pm and small children stare, point and scream at us for being unknown pasty giants.
The following day in Cuenca began with an excellent veggie lunch at Café Ñucallacta, featuring my third ever self-imposed coffee, an oat milk cortado (I told you Ecuador was bougie). Then we hit some museums: the Museo del Sombrero (yes, hats) was brief but fun; the Museo Pumapungo (free entry, quite jazzy inside) offered the usual stuff, ie, a solid display of ancient pots shaped as silly looking animals that are meant to represent power and fear and usually fertility thrown in as well.
Upstairs we really enjoyed an exhibition of shrunken heads: not the first I’ve seen, but the first place to actively explain the traditions and beliefs behind them. Historically, some indigenous communities like the Shuar people of the Ecuadorian Amazon would shrink the decapitated heads of enemies by slow boiling them in a way that preserved the victim’s skin and hair, a process known as tsantsa. It’s remarkably clever, if macabre. If you’ve never seen a shrunken head up close and personal, you really should. They have a couple of definitely stolen ones at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, if that happens to be closer to home. I’ll spare you the details of how they did it, but there’s an explanation here and a disturbing YouTube video here of a guy trying out the process on a pig under the pretence of science.
Some articles online like this one suggest that head boiling was a rite of passage for boys, who were expected to kill an enemy and make a trophy of his skull to transition into manhood, but I’m not sure that’s true. The Pumapungo museum stated only that it was a tit-for-tat thing: if a member of a tribe was murdered by an enemy, someone from the victim’s community would then seek to get the head of the murderer in return. Of course they didn’t actually describe it as tit-for-tat, rather that it was a necessary part of the Shuar peoples’ spiritualism to balance the disappearance of souls. (Side note: if that’s the case… then when and how does the murdering end?!)
Trading of shrunken heads (ie, for commercial purposes) was made illegal in Ecuador and Peru in the 1930s, and these days Shuar communities only practice the tradition on skunks. Or at least that’s what they tell the authorities.
Sunday was another long and quite painful bus ride for the final stretch of the journey north to Quito. Ten hours, no toilet on board and no lunch stop. Cruel! We were granted a mercy stop seven hours in at a petrol station, where everyone ran to use the bathroom and stocked up on ice creams from the counter. But that should be the last long journey for a while – we’ll be settling here in Quito for much of the next week with the addition of our celebrity guest, Ann Hughes, aka the honourable outgoing Mayor of Lichfield, aka Dave’s mum. She admitted this week she’s not yet tried a Pisco sour, so that will be fun. Have a good week!
Travel bits and tips from this week
In Piura we ate a monstrous portion of chicken wings followed by sushi at a place called Nagasaki Fusion (lol) on Avenida Grau.
To get to Ecuador, we took a bus from Piura in northern Peru and crossed at Macara. Annoyingly, there is only one bus scheduled every day and it travels overnight, reaching the border in the early hours. But on the plus side, it meant the border was quiet and immigration was relatively painless.
In Loja we stayed in an Airbnb that was, by all intents and purposes, a garage. But the bed was comfortable and the space was nice, once you got over the fact it was a garage.
Our first Ecuadorian menu del dia was at Casa de Miriam46 (where are the other 45?) and we had a pizza later that day at Forno di Fango on the same road.
Day two in Loja included a drink in La Huerta, a charming bar with an enchanted garden full of vines that served a very welcome mulled wine (I was cold).
In Cuenca we had a curry at the Taj Mahal, because we are basic Brits, and a nightcap at Goza.
Then the following day I had some very tasty huevos rancheros at Café Ñucallacta, and later, drinks overlooking the cathedral at Cuenca Beer Company.
More on Quito next week, but here’s a link to our Airbnb again, possibly the best one yet?