A Motorcyclist's Guide to Eating on the Coast of Ecuador

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Riding Ecuador's Pacific coast comes with a serious side benefit: you get hungry.

From Esmeraldas in the north to Manabí and the warmer lowlands farther south, the food changes along with the landscape. Coconut gives way to peanuts. Seafood arrives straight from the Pacific. Plantains, yuca, fresh herbs, chilies, and local vegetables show up in dishes with names like encocado, tonga, and cazuela de verde.

These are meals worth stopping for. They also tell you something about the communities you are riding through, because many of Ecuador's coastal dishes carry stories of migration, agriculture, trade, and traditions that have survived for generations.

We spoke with Michelle O. Fried, author of the Ecuadorian cookbook Comidas del Ecuador and founder of FUEGOS, an organization dedicated to preserving coastal culinary traditions and training local cooks.

We asked her what makes Ecuador's coastal cooking distinctive and what motorcycle and 4x4 travelers should look for along the way.

Esmeraldas: Coconut, Seafood, and Encocado

Michelle points first to Esmeraldas, where Afro-Ecuadorian cooking has helped shape one of the country's most distinctive regional cuisines.

Fresh seafood is central to the food here. Fish and shellfish may be grilled, fried, steamed, or simmered, but one of the signature preparations is encocado: seafood cooked in a rich coconut sauce.

The coconut is grated and worked into a milk that becomes the base for fish, shrimp, shellfish, and other dishes. The result is rich without burying the flavor of the seafood.

Coconut also appears in one of Ecuador's most addictive roadside sweets: the cocada. Made with shredded coconut, milk, and cane sugar, cocadas are chewy, sweet, and easy to carry.

They fit nicely into a tank bag or glove compartment, although a plastic bag is strongly recommended. They are sticky enough to remind you where you put them.

Manabí: Peanuts Take Over

Ride south toward Manabí and the flavor of the food begins to change. Coconut becomes less dominant and peanuts start appearing everywhere.

Ground peanuts give sauces, soups, and stews a richness that is immediately recognizable once you have eaten a few meals in the province.

Traditional cooking in Manabí also makes use of clay ovens and pots, along with ingredients such as plantain, yuca, sweet potato, corn, herbs, and seafood.

Yuca appears constantly along the coast. You will find it boiled, fried, baked into bread, or served alongside meat and seafood. Fresh yuca bread is especially good when you find it warm from a roadside vendor.

Another Manabí staple is salprieta, a mixture traditionally made with ground toasted corn, peanuts, herbs, and seasoning.

As Michelle puts it, you can put it on almost anything: soup, eggs, rice, or whatever else happens to be on the plate.

Tonga: The Original Road Meal

For motorcycle travelers, few coastal dishes make more sense than the tonga, also known in some areas as a pandao.

A tonga is a complete meal wrapped inside a leaf. Rice, chicken, ripe plantain, and peanut sauce are packed together and steamed or kept warm inside the wrapping.

Open the leaf and you have lunch and a plate at the same time.

The wrapping helps hold heat and moisture, and according to Michelle, it also contributes to the flavor of the meal.

The dish developed as practical food for workers who needed something portable enough to carry into the fields and forests for a long day of labor.

More than a century later, it still works beautifully as road food.

Every Table Has Ají

Soon after arriving in Ecuador, you will notice a small bowl of ají on restaurant tables.

There is no single recipe. Every region, restaurant, household, and cook seems to have a variation.

Ingredients can include tree tomato, onion, citrus, vinegar, herbs, and different varieties of chili peppers. The texture may be thin or thick, the color can change considerably, and the level of heat ranges from mild to enough to make you pay attention.

On the coast, local ingredients influence the recipe just as they do everything else on the plate. In Manabí, some versions use particularly hot chilies and locally produced vinegar.

Try the ají wherever you stop. Comparing one town's version with the next becomes part of traveling through Ecuador.

Menestra, Zapallo, and a Bit of Italian History

Another common coastal dish is menestra, a stew generally made with legumes such as lentils or beans.

Along the coast, cooks may add zapallo, a local squash, giving the stew additional sweetness and body.

Michelle points to another interesting Manabí tradition: the use of olive oil in some local cooking.

That connection reaches back to the late nineteenth century, when Bahía de Caráquez became an important port for exporting tagua, the hard white seed sometimes called vegetable ivory. Tagua was shipped to Europe, where it was used to manufacture buttons and other goods.

Trade worked both ways, and imported European ingredients also reached the coast. Olive oil became part of some local cooking traditions and remained there.

Fresh Herbs Matter

Manabí cooking also relies heavily on ingredients such as onion, celery, garlic, and freshly cut herbs.

Michelle emphasizes the importance of those herbs. Ceviches, soups, and stews are often finished with greens chopped immediately before the dish reaches the table.

It is a small detail, but after a few meals on the coast you begin to notice it. The food tastes fresh because much of it is.

What to Drink Along the Coast

The hotter the riding gets, the more interesting the roadside drinks become.

Depending on where you stop, you may find sweet drinks made with local fruit, cane sugar, corn, or plantain-based vinegar. Traditional preparations vary from community to community.

And sometimes the best option requires no recipe at all: a chilled coconut opened in front of you.

After a few hours riding in tropical heat, drinking cold coconut water straight from the shell is difficult to improve upon.

Save Room for Rocafuerte

North of Manta, the town of Rocafuerte is known for an extraordinary variety of traditional sweets.

Many are built around simple ingredients such as milk, flour, sugar, cinnamon, nuts, dried fruit, and coconut, then shaped and wrapped in brightly colored paper.

This is another place where carrying soft luggage presents a problem. You may arrive convinced that there is absolutely no more room on the motorcycle and leave twenty minutes later having discovered otherwise.

Eat Where You Ride

Ecuador's Pacific coast is one of those places where lunch should be part of the route.

Stop at the small restaurant by the road. Order something you haven't tried before. Ask what the town is known for. Put a little ají on the plate and see what happens.

The food changes as you ride south, just as the landscape does. Coconut, peanuts, plantains, seafood, herbs, yuca, corn, and dozens of local ingredients tell you where you are without needing a map.

And long after a motorcycle adventure through Ecuador is over, some of the meals you found along the road may be among the things you remember best.

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Rick Segreda is a film critic, travel writer, filmmaker, writing instructor, and public speaker with citizenship in both Ecuador and the United States.

His interviews have included filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, graphic designer Milton Glaser, and adventurer Les Stroud of Survivorman. His work, in both Spanish and English, has been published in Chile, Ecuador, England, and the United States.

Photos of the tonga courtesy of Alicia M. Rodriguez.