On a steamy June afternoon seven or eight years ago, I was standing just off a curb in midtown Manhattan, trying unsuccessfully to get a cab to La Guardia Airport. I found myself having thoughts about the city that would not have pleased the Convention & Visitors Bureau—thoughts about the weather, thoughts about the structural flaws of the New York taxi industry. Then a Lincoln town car appeared in front of me. The uniformed driver lowered the window, and I was hit with frigid air. “Where you going?” he said.
“La Guardia,” I said.
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“Deal.”
I got in. The driver identified himself as José. As we made it over the bridge and hit the Grand Central Parkway, he told me that he was from Ecuador, a country I had visited a few months before. I told him how much I’d enjoyed Ecuador—the gorgeous mountains, the markets, and, most of all, the ceviche.
Ceviche in Ecuador, I said, is to American ceviche what the seafood cocktails of Veracruz—oysters, shrimp, snails, octopus, crab, avocado, onions, and coriander chopped in front of your eyes into a liquid that in a just world would be what Bloody Mary mix tastes like—are to those balsa-wood and ketchup combinations that people in country-club dining rooms get when they order the shrimp-cocktail appetizer.
Ecuadorean ceviche starts out with fresh fish cured by being marinated in lemon juice and enlivened by whatever else the chef has thought to add. It’s liquid, like a bowl of tangy cold soup. Roasted corn kernels (flicked off Andean corn, whose kernels are sometimes the size of broad beans) are served on the side, to be tossed in for both flavor and crunch. Some restaurants offer not only roasted corn kernels but popcorn. Yes, popcorn—what less fortunate humans eat at the movies!
“You like that ceviche?” José asked. He sounded pleased but mildly surprised, like an artist who has just heard effusive praise of a painting that is actually one of his earlier works.
“I love that ceviche, José,” I said. “I would probably kill for that ceviche.”
“When’s your plane?” José asked.
“Oh, I’ve got time,” I said.
Instantly, he swerved off the Grand Central, and we were driving along a commercial street in Queens. Most of the signs on the stores were in Spanish. Some were in Chinese or Korean. In five minutes, we turned onto a side street, in front of a restaurant called Islas Galapagos.
We got two orders of ceviche. We cleaned our bowls. Then we got back into the car and drove to La Guardia. “This is a great city, José,” I said as I hauled my baggage out of the icy splendor of his town car. “A little hot sometimes, but a great city.”
On the other hand, the sort of New Yorker who’s confident that even a stroke of good fortune can be complained about might point out that I had to go all the way to Queens to find Ecuadorean ceviche. I live in lower Manhattan, and at the time I met José, I’d almost never had a ceviche close to home. In New York I had never even seen roasted corn kernels—what Ecuadoreans sometimes call tostados and Peruvians call cancha. (They are neither roasted nor toasted, of course, but pan-fried, then salted, so that they’re crunchy on the outside and soft, almost powdery, on the inside.) A couple of ceviches I had in Manhattan actually came accompanied by commercial Cornnuts, which, being approximately the right size and color, serve as a substitute for cancha about as effectively as marshmallows, being approximately the right size and color, would serve as a substitute for diver scallops.
These days, ceviche is definitely available in Manhattan. Around the time of my La Guardia adventure, Douglas Rodriguez brought it into the mainstream at Patria, and he later installed an entire ceviche bar at Chicama, complete with popcorn. I’ve read about a Manhattan restaurant that offers a sort of pour la table ceviche appetizer for $50—a dish no visiting Ecuadorean would be able to eat, of course, since he would have fainted dead away upon learning the price.
Still, as the years passed, I thought more and more about a trip to serious ceviche country, which could mean, of course, almost anywhere in Latin America. When FBI agents tapped the prison phone calls of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, one conversation that made them suspect that he was employing a devilishly clever code concerned a ceviche recipe. Ceviche is so entrenched in Mexico that Rick Bayless, a scholar of Mexican food, has been serving it, usually made from marlin, since he opened Frontera Grill in Chicago 14 years ago. There is wide agreement, though, that the red-hot center of ceviche eating is around Ecuador and Peru—two countries that, after several decades, have more or less settled their border dispute but still argue about which one does the best job with marinated fish.
Last spring I decided I had to go to Ecuador and Peru to get a booster shot of the real article. A number of people asked me if I really intended to travel all that way just to eat ceviche. Not at all. In Peru, for instance, I was looking forward to sampling the stuffed pepper that many consider the signature dish of Arequipa, and I fully intended to have my share of Andean potatoes. I thought I might tuck away some churros—possibly some churros with chocolate on them. I still remembered a couple of the soups I’d had during my first trip to Ecuador while staying at a charming inn called Hacienda Cusin, near the great Andean market town of Otavalo, and I thought I might see about arranging a reprise. I was seriously considering guinea pig, which is such a strong regional specialty around Cuzco that the most famous 17th-century religious painting in the Cuzco cathedral shows it as what Jesus and his disciples are about to eat at the Last Supper. I also had visions of sitting in a comfortable hotel bar somewhere sipping Pisco sours while tossing down handfuls of cancha and expressing sympathy for travelers who were at that moment at other hotel bars all around the world trying to make do with mixed nuts. No, I assured the people questioning my trip, I wasn’t going all that way just to eat ceviche. I like to think of myself as a broad-gauged person.
My older daughter, Abigail, who lives in San Francisco, agreed to meet me in Peru, and my wife, Alice, said she’d link up with us in Quito. When I dropped into Chicama to ask Douglas Rodriguez for some tips about where to eat down there, he said he’d prefer to show us himself, and we arranged to meet him and his wife and his publisher and the ceviche-bar chef from Chicama in Guayaquil for a couple of days of sampling. We had become the ceviche gang.
“Would it be fair to say that you’re wimping out on the guinea pig?” Abigail asked.
We were in a restaurant in Cuzco. At the table next to us, there was a woman who had the appearance of a classic gringa—a very pale American of the type that the people of Cuzco sometimes refer to as a cruda, meaning, literally, “uncooked.” She looked like the sort of tourist who might ask the waiter if there was anything available from a can, but we had just seen her presented with an entire roasted guinea pig, head and all. Abigail had spoken just as the waiter took a picture of the guinea pig and then carried it back to the kitchen to be dismembered. As the carcass passed our table, it occurred to me that Louisiana, which is trying to encourage people to eat nutria, might find it advantageous to join forces with Peru to form a Rodent Marketing Board.
I reminded Abigail that trout was also a specialty of the area, and I had ordered trout ceviche—a bold move into freshwater ceviche that I considered the equivalent of going to Wisconsin and ordering, say, walleye sashimi. I’d also had ceviche in Arequipa, squeezing a sea-bass version in between stuffed-pepper stops, and it was already clear to me that Peruvians and Ecuadoreans had different notions of what authentic ceviche is. In Peru ceviche is not something soupy that comes in a bowl; it would not ordinarily include additives like tomatoes. It is, essentially, chunks of fish (or shrimp or some combination of shellfish) and spices and shredded onions—served on a plate, eaten with a fork, and flanked by a couple of thick wedges of potato or corn. I would imagine that Peruvians consider their version of ceviche stately and Ecuadoreans consider it dull.
Abigail and I had a lot of it. In the Lima shorefront neighborhood of Chorrillos, we visited a couple of spots that had a dozen or two cevicherias side by side in a single ramshackle shed. And at Costa Verde, one of the vast and somewhat overblown Lima restaurants built out into the Pacific, a waiter wearing a tuxedo served us Ceviche Don Raúl, a scallop, shrimp, and mushroom mixture that, according to the menu, was a contender for culinary honors at the World Exposition in Seville in 1992.
About an hour south of Lima, in Pucusana, a fishing village that is also the site of some flashy vacation houses, we came across a neatly dressed young man behind a cart of the sort hot-dog vendors use in New York. He was wearing a baseball cap and an exceedingly white T-shirt. He had set up shop just a few yards from the market shed where the local fishermen brought in their catch. A couple of umbrellas shaded the cart, and a half dozen plastic stools had been placed on one side for customers. A sign announced that the young man was a specialist in instant ceviche. After a customer had ordered, the instant-ceviche specialist went to work, using a stainless-steel kitchen bowl as a sort of wok. He squeezed a few hyperacidic little lemons onto the fish, then added chopped-up celery and garlic and peppers and a little water and shredded onions. He stirred and cut with practiced motions, at one point flicking a bit of the sauce on the back of his hand so he could check the balance of spices with a quick taste. The entire ceviche-making process couldn’t have taken more than 30 or 40 seconds. After he’d placed my ceviche on a plate, he hesitated for a moment, and then tossed onto the side of the plate a handful of cancha. Abigail seemed to catch the relief on my face. I think at that moment we may both have faced up to the possibility that what I had been dreaming of for seven or eight years was not ceviche but panfried corn kernels.
Not that I had any complaints about the ceviche. The one dished out by the specialist in instant ceviche was first-rate, and so was the one I had across the street, in a restaurant called Bahia-Turistica, an hour later. I was having trouble keeping my focus, though, because other dishes crowded in on the ceviches like so much tasty static. This problem was particularly acute at Costanera 700, a Lima seafood restaurant whose proprietor, Humberto Sato, is spoken of by ceviche hounds like Douglas Rodriguez in tones approaching reverence. Sato named his restaurant after its address—a service to customers, since there is no sign. Like a lot of serious seafood restaurants in Lima—or serious purveyors of Arequipeña specialties in Arequipa, for that matter—Costanera 700 is open only for the midday meal. It’s in a line of buildings on the water’s edge of the less-than-uplifting Lima neighborhood of San Miguel. Its main dining room, while not unpleasant, suggests a smallish airplane hangar. Our cabdriver had a difficult time finding Costanera 700 and was not convinced we had made it even after we’d arrived. The drivers of important politicians and businessmen apparently have no such problem; they’re familiar with the route.
Humberto Sato turned out to be a preternaturally calm man of Japanese ancestry who speaks about fish in the way a master furnituremaker might discuss fruitwoods. His menu offered five sorts of ceviche. Abigail and I ordered Ceviche Costanera, which is made with olive oil, and Ceviche La Paz, a Peruvian coastal ceviche that takes on a yellowish color from the peppers used to season it. The ceviches were perfect: The tastes of the fish and the marinades and the spices blended together with great subtlety. We figured that before we went on to the tiradito—a Peruvian form of ceviche in which the fish is in slices, as in sashimi, instead of in chunks, and is usually served without onions—we’d vary the meal with shrimp served sizzling on an iron griddle. That dish can sometimes be no more than a garlic-delivery system, but not in Sato’s hands. Encouraged, we tried the chita, a fish I’d never heard of, cooked inside a cast of salt, which the waiter carefully cracked open, like an experienced orthopedist freeing up a mended ankle. Then we had rice with tiny shrimp. At that point, the tiradito was simply an impossibility. I comforted myself with the thought that we were about to go to Ecuador, where something like tiradito would probably be thought of as nothing more than a good start.
“Be careful, save room,” Douglas Rodriguez said. “We’re on our way to Mecca.” He kept on eating as he spoke.
Led by an Ecuadorean friend of Rodriguez’s named Humberto Mata, we’d arrived at one of those multi-cevicheria buildings in Playas, a town an hour or so west of Guayaquil. Our eventual destination was the resort town of Salinas, where Douglas had predicted we’d have the best ceviche in Ecuador at a place he’d once visited called La Lojanita. The building in Playas was a large shed that had a thatched roof and used split-bamboo fences to carve out separate outdoor dining areas for a dozen or so cevicherias with names like Cevicheria Brisas del Mar and Cevicheria Viagra Marina—the latter an allusion, I assumed, to the widespread belief in that part of South America that ceviche is useful not only as a hangover cure but as a sexual tonic. (“Anything with that much acid in it can’t actually be good for hangovers,” I had been told by a resident of Lima, who was mum on the sexual-tonic issue.) The cevicheria we’d chosen was a corner establishment called Fuente del Sabor, or Source of Taste, and the food made Douglas’s warning difficult to heed. After some fine black-clam ceviche, we had been served patacones (chunks of plantain pressed down into the frying pan with a wooden mallet until about the size of a cocktail-party crab cake), a spectacular seafood and rice combination, and a huge oyster that, after having been pried open with a hammer and chisel, had been covered with cheese and butter and mustard and cooked right on the flame of the range, with its enormous shell acting as the cooking vessel.
The ceviche gang was on its second day of eating. In Guayaquil, our haul had included a ceviche with so much tomato that it veered toward the fish cocktails of Veracruz and, in a simple but spectacular restaurant called Los Arbolitos, a sort of mixed-stew platter that included a tripe stew, a fish stew, a mixture of salt cod and onions, and, perched on top of the pile like a jolly hat on somebody wearing a dull brown uniform, a ceviche. We’d eaten fish in a peanut sauce that tasted almost like curry, plus a sort of onion soup with tuna. At a place called Churrín Churrón, in a flashy shopping center that also had a Pizza Hut and a Dunkin’ Donuts, we’d had a chocolate-filled churro that Abigail said was worth the trip.
We had also eaten fanesca, an astonishing fish and vegetable soup, nearly as thick as porridge, which is available in Ecuador only during Holy Week. In the Quito market, on the day after Palm Sunday, I’d noticed signs saying hoy fanesca! By Tuesday I’d eaten it three times. As I worked on the rice and shellfish in Playas, I found myself wondering what good deed I might have done long ago that resulted in my landing in Ecuador by accident during Holy Week. In other words, I was trying to anticipate ceviche at La Lojanita while daydreaming about fanesca and shoveling in a shellfish and rice dish I couldn’t seem to stop eating. “Save room,” Douglas said again as he carved off another piece of the oyster. “Don’t forget about Mecca.”
La Lojanita turned out to be a couple of blocks inland from the Salinas beach, just past a cevicheria cluster called Cevichelandia. It was an open-air place, with permanent stools lined up next to a counter on two sides. Its sign was further proof that the Coca-Cola company had a lock on cevicheria signage in Ecuador and Peru. Douglas did the ordering, and I could hear him go down the list, almost like a chant: black clam, octopus, regular shrimp, shrimp in the manner normally used for langostina (which were unavailable), sea bass with the sort of mustard sauce usually accompanying crab (also unavailable), mixed. As we started to eat, I looked around and realized that much of the ceviche gang had fallen by the wayside. Douglas and his publisher, Phil Wood, and his ceviche chef, Adrian Leon, and I were the only ones left at the counter. In front of us I counted 20 bowls of ceviche. “Do you think you really have to taste every single one?” Alice asked from the sidelines. She spoke in the tone she uses when, after quick inspection of the outfit I’ve chosen for an evening out, she asks, “Is that the jacket you’re going to wear?”
I did think I had to taste every single one; I couldn’t let the side down. We grabbed spoons and started. Everyone remarked on the glories of the black clam. After Adrian tasted the second type of shrimp, I heard him mutter, “Russian dressing.” I was trying to keep up with the rest of the gang, even though it did occur to me that Humberto Sato would probably describe most of what we were eating with whatever Spanish phrase translates roughly into “gussied up.” Douglas praised the octopus but thought that, all in all, La Lojanita was not quite as good as it had been on his previous visit. It was possible that the proprietor had become distracted, he said, since the splendor of her ceviche had led to her being elected mayor of Salinas.
I woke up the next morning feeling a bit fragile. For some reason, I was imagining the Seville culinary competition Abigail and I had seen mentioned on Costa Verde’s menu. I envisioned it as purely a ceviche contest. The judges appeared to be Sevillano gazpacho experts pressed into service, although there were also some of those stone-faced East Germans who always seem to be among those judging Olympic diving competitions. The instant-ceviche man was there, again in a baseball cap and a crisp white T-shirt, practicing his moves in the corner. Manuel Noriega paced back and forth, glowering at his competitors in an attempt to frighten them away. Rick Bayless walked in from Chicago carrying a huge marlin on a sling across his back, the way Indian women at the Otavalo market sometimes carry full-grown sheep. Off to the side, Humberto Sato, dressed in street clothes rather than his chef’s whites, stood silently, having decided to withdraw because the fish were not up to his standards. Some health-food demonstrators who objected to the acid in ceviche were parading around with signs that said if it does that to a sea bass, think of what it’s doing to you! I wasn’t planning to stay for the judging. I’d decided to take a day or two off from ceviche eating.
A couple of days later, we were back at Hacienda Cusin—the rare example of a place that has been restored into complete comfort with no accompanying glitz. I was sitting in one of the courtyards, having a chat about fanesca with the chef, Marco Yanez, who had provided us with a particularly splendid example on Good Friday. An explanation of its preparation makes fanesca sound like something that should appear on an absolutely accurate menu as Potage Labor Intensive. It must include 12 grains and beans, to represent the 12 apostles—each ingredient soaked and cooked and dried and peeled separately. The base, salt cod cooked in milk, is thickened with peanuts; naturally, it’s mandatory to start with raw peanuts, then toast them, then peel them, then grind them. I could see why fanesca is eaten only during Holy Week: When some frantically slurping teenager calls out, “Mom, can we have this again next week?” it stands to reason that Mom, her fingers sore from peeling corn kernels and fava beans, would answer, “Talk to me in about a year, buster.”
Fanesca must be, among other things, a restorative: With a couple of bowls of it under my belt, I was able to begin my next lunch by enthusiastically polishing off a shrimp ceviche and a hearts of palm ceviche. Even while I was eating the ceviche, though, I found myself calculating how many more fanesca opportunities I’d have before Easter Sunday. I couldn’t help wondering if, assuming the labor-cost issue could be sorted out, some restaurant in New York—maybe even some restaurant in lower Manhattan—might be induced to put fanesca on its menu. In New York, of course, there’d be no reason to be overly strict about the custom of serving it only during Holy Week. When the ingredients were available, a sign on the restaurant would announce hoy fanesca!