Good Beer, Bad Coffee

Moving is a traumatic time. This might sound melodramatic - indeed, it is, as the trauma is very mild - but having settled for so long in one location, our roots tend to have spread and, like a plant being repotted into unfamiliar soil, it takes some time for us to harmonise with our new environment.

Unlike our tranquil and isolated cottage on a hill in Cusco, our new home is more of a basic hostel, with several other guests and the attendant noise of both them and the city. However, the temperatures at night do not fall as low as Peru, possibly owing to the lower altitude.

For breakfast this morning we tried the eponymous pastries from local pastelería, Quesadillas de San Juan. Unlike the Mexican foodstuff of the same name, quesadillas in Ecuador are a sweet flat sponge cake partly wrapped in a pentagonal thin pastry crust. With the delicacy, we had our first coffee in the country, which was overly milky.

Quesadillas Ecuador style

Lunch at Hare Krishna restaurant and cultural centre, Govinda, in the historic centre proved to be a cheap and nutritious almuerzo of the kind we have become used to in South America. Potato soup, followed by a simple but tasty lentil stew with brown rice and vegetables, was accompanied by naranjilla juice - a kind of fruit that resembles a small persimmon but has a much tarter taste - and a portion of dense vegan chocolate cake.

Govinda lunch

We wandered the streets of the old town, arranged, as usual for Spanish settlements, on a grid, draped over the natural undulations of the Pichincha region's landscape. Much more than anywhere we have so far visited, we found ourselves rounding a corner and facing a near-vertical pavement.

Taking a break, we ventured another attempt at coffee - being fans of the Ecuadorian beans we can buy at home - but found a travesty against the name. While being far from a coffee snob, I do refuse to drink the instant variety, so it was with no small amount of dismay that I was presented with "café con leche" comprising a mug of warm milk and a glass jar, more used to containing vinegar or oil, full of coffee essence. The dark liquid had the effect of gravy browning, changing the colour of the milk, but not the taste.

Coffee badness

Fortunately, the stop in the afternoon, at Bandido Brewing, met with greater success. Over a basket of plain popcorn, which seems to be served as a matter of course on most tables, we supped some excellent ale produced in house.

Bandido brewpub

La Gua.P.A., flavoured with the local guasuya tea leaf, was an excellently hopped pale, which actually outshone the 'double' version of their Hop Rey IPA. However, the star was undoubtedly a guest blackberry porter (7.7%) that was rich and full-bodied with brambly flavour, although I failed to find out its origin.

Beer and popcorn

First impressions of Quito are that, like many capital cities, it is a little grey and grimy around the edges. This impression isn't helped by the clouds, which seem to persistently hand around the tops of the surrounding hills and descend into the vale of the city.

We returned to our poorly appointed shared kitchen, and were glad to have eaten a large meal in the middle of the day. Having left behind a well-equipped kitchen that was shamefully neglected owing to the magnificent cuisine available elsewhere in Cusco, it is ironic that we shall probably find ourselves cooking for ourselves more here.

I made an excursion to the well-stocked supermarket, Supermaxi, to acquire some Ecuadorian craft beers, which proved to be a fairly humdrum selection from the likes of Camino del Sol, Páramo, Sabai, and Ballesta. Sadly, they were not a patch on the output from Bandido.