My first night in Ecuador I spent wandering around the historic center of downtown Quito, Centro Histórico, after a miscommunication with a cab driver from the airport left my friend and I in the wrong part of town. Oops.
Centro Histórico is a lovely place, even at night, however it was late and we were hungry. We asked a passing policeman (since then I’ve discovered there are many of them around town) if he could direct us to the closest restaurant. He recommended one in a hotel across the square, the Plaza Grande Hotel.
It was excellent. Muchas gracias, señor policia!
They served us fried plantain chips to start, with dips of varying spicyness. My friend had a beer while I was looking for something warm that wasn’t coffee, and our waiter surprised me with a hot drink that was a mix of cinnamon, fruit juice and aguardiente. Turns out that stuff is popular in more places than Colombia. I wish could remember the name of that drink. It looked a bit like swamp water, but it was delicious and you could hardly taste the alcohol.
We followed our drinks with some empanadas and then dinner which, as you can see, was a good sized portion! Very similar to the bandeja paises I tried in Medellín, but without all the sauce to turn everything into a stew.
We followed that with more drinks, and my friend ordered ice cream. Not long after he’d ordered, the lights went out in the restaurant and a church bell started ringing. Immediately we thought there was something wrong, like a power outage. Or maybe the city was under attack? There was no one else in the restaurant and we saw nothing happening outside.
While we were wondering WTF was going on we saw a guy come out of the kitchen wearing monk robes carrying the ice cream. The bells stopped ringing and chanting monk music started playing. It all happened so fast I didn’t even think to take a photo.
Oh, and then they lit the ice cream on fire. Um, what?
Did Ecuadorian monks of old set their ice cream on fire before they ate it? Do monks even eat ice cream? Or was this supposed to be some kind of tourist prank? More importantly, would I eat there again? You bet I would. I’d go there just for the ice cream “experience”.
-C
