Top 20
6. Osaka
Osaka has spent decades refining the language of Nikkei cuisine in Peru; in Quito, it picks up new accents. Japanese and Peruvian sensibilities meet Amazonian paiche and endemic ingredients such as taxo, cacao and aguaymanto, in a polished, cosmopolitan experience spanning kitchen, bar, design and music. It manages to feel unmistakably part of a global brand without ever seeming disconnected from the place it inhabits.
7. Marrecife
Nearly twenty years after opening, Marrecife still feels fresh. Iván Grain starts from a seafood tradition he knows well and pushes it somewhere increasingly personal. Ceviches and mixed rice dishes share the menu with charcoal-grilled snook seasoned with peanuts, coconut and “chillangua” herbs, in a kitchen where tradition and curiosity carry equal weight. Few restaurants capture Guayaquil’s relationship with the sea so naturally.
8. Clara
At Clara, Felipe Salas, Ana Lobato and Ángel De Sousa run Ecuadorian cuisine through three formidable creative filters. Their inventiveness takes you from smoked albacore with peanut leche de tigre to beef tartare with mashua and bone marrow; add a dining room with a pulse of its own to round out a restaurant where what arrives at the table is rarely what you expect.
9. Le Bistró
Sebastián Borja cooks like someone who knows the rules well enough not to worry about them anymore. At Le Bistró, escargots, pâté and steak-frites share the menu with Thai curry and duck wontons, held together less by any single flag than by technique and good taste. The result has something that is hard to fake: a kitchen with craft, appetite and a personality you recognize at once.
10. Banh Mi
Wok dishes, curries, kimchi, Korean barbecue, baos and flavors drawn from across Asia stay true to their roots while picking up new accents from Ecuador’s pantry. The cooking is polished without ever losing the heat, irreverence and sense of fun that define chef Felipe Salas. A well-traveled kitchen that feels completely at home in Quito.
