Best Hueca

A hueca is born on the street, built by customers who come back again and again. El Pez Volador has spent more than four decades growing exactly that way, around a ritual deeply woven into life in Guayaquil: the encebollado.

The story begins in 1983 with Angélica Cujilán, a young mother newly arrived from the town of Milagro, looking for a better life for herself and her little girl in the big city. She started out looking after a local eatery, where she watched the cooks make a peculiar dish of yuca and albacore tuna. They gave it a name she had never heard before. When steady work proved hard to find, she set up a table outside her house and began making her own version. Ten bowls. That was all she could manage.

One of her first customers ordered all ten and happily polished them off. He was the “Rey de la Cantera,” a well-known radio personality whose enthusiasm convinced her she might be onto something. He even gave the place its name: El Pez Volador. The table on the sidewalk became a kiosk; the kiosk became a restaurant. Angélica, who had learned to cook from her father and grandmother, ended up making her own a dish she didn’t even know existed before arriving in Guayaquil.

The precise origins of encebollado are still argued over, but its urban history leads back to the shipyards along the Guayas River, where tuna’s protein, yuca’s heft and the sharp freshness of pickled onion came together in one brutally efficient bowl. Cheap, filling food for workers became breakfast, then Ecuador’s national cure for hangovers. Today, encebollado is recognized as part of Ecuador’s Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Angélica’s version incorporates a broth with body, layered with mint, basil, coriander, celery and ginger. When Anthony Bourdain came to Ecuador, he went to her place to try it. He loved it and featured El Pez Volador on the Travel Channel. Two years later, Angélica won the Gold Culinary Star at the inaugural Raíces food fair. These days, on a holiday, the family sends out over 700 bowls!

Angélica has turned down offers to franchise. She wants El Pez Volador to remain family patrimony. And she isn’t just a name on the sign. She is still there, every day, surrounded by children, nieces, nephews and other relatives working alongside her. She knows her regulars, knows what they order and exactly how they like it, though she laughs that, with so many new faces now coming through the door, she’s beginning to lose count.

That presence —warm, restless, permanently switched on— matters almost as much as the flavor that made the restaurant what it is. Angélica has given one of Guayaquil’s most beloved everyday dishes a home, a face and a story of its own. What began as ten bowls on a table outside her house has become one of the city’s defining street dives.