“Every South American country has its own rhythm, you know?” Alejandro Chamorro squints as the sun streams in through the windows of Nuema. He’s serving their latest tasting menu over lunch – a more intimate way to welcome guests and talk food, and culture, and creativity, in the close-up way he and Pia Salazar like to do.
But Nuema is already welcoming. The red brick and white walled exterior, the open wood fire and floorboards, the big monochrome portraits, and the stone interior walls. Each element also echoes Ecuador’s varied landscapes, just as Chamorro’s menu draws from sea, mountain, and jungle. This is a country where “you can have breakfast by the sea, lunch in the mountains, and dinner in the city.”
Four Distinct Worlds Within Its Borders
Ecuador stands as a fascinating microcosm of South America, packing remarkable detail into a country smaller than most of its neighbors. Brazil and Argentina dominate the continent’s economy and landmass. But Ecuador offers something unique: in total four distinct worlds within its borders, when you add the islands referred to as “a ‘melting pot’ of marine species” that are 1,000km off the coast. The snow-capped Andes, the Amazon rainforest, the Pacific coast, and the remote Galápagos Islands create a natural diversity unmatched in the region.
With 18 million people, Ecuador might lack the economic muscle of Chile or Brazil, but it punches above its weight in agriculture and biodiversity, leading the world in banana exports and boasting the highest concentration of species per square kilometer of anywhere in the world. Like Peru and Bolivia, it maintains a strong indigenous presence, with about a quarter of its population keeping ancient traditions alive alongside modern Latin American culture. Though it has grappled with political instability, Ecuador’s natural wonders and cultural heritage have made it an increasingly important destination in South America’s tourism landscape.
Remarkable Nuema
Nuema is a confluence of everything unique about Ecuador. Naturally, it’s become a flagbearer for the country’s gastronomic scene. It’s a restaurant where, with pastry chef Pia Salazar (also Alejandro’s wife), they serve a seven-course tasting menu. Alejandro Chamorro’s dishes blend local ingredients in surprising ways, like bone marrow with black clam fudge, while Salazar crafts desserts using Ecuadorian herbs, flowers and unique ingredients like sacha inchi, and u’kuisi, an Amazonian fruit they use as natural food coloring. As in Alejandro’s dishes, Pia will play around with two or three key ingredients, or focusing on a core concept, often throwing together locally sourced fruits and vegetables.
And in 2020, Nuema, Quito, duly became Ecuador’s first ever entry on Latin America’s 50 Best Restaurants, hitting #48. Then Pia was named Best Pastry Chef of Latin America 2022, and a year after that the Best Pastry Chef of the World 2023, a year when Nuema was recognized on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list for the first time.
Before all that, the restaurant evolved from a bistro in Quito’s business district, where rushed executives wanted quick lunches, into something more ambitious. A move to a hotel location, with reduced overhead costs, gave Alejandro the freedom to experiment. He switched to a tasting menu format, allowing the kitchen to showcase Ecuador’s biodiversity in a single sitting.
“I mean who would think these things could go together?”
The pandemic’s forced introspection revealed both Nuema’s potential and its challenges. While local appreciation soared, with waiting lists for a table stretching to six months, the fundamental challenge remained: sourcing ingredients from Ecuador’s remote corners, where traditional suppliers often saw culinary treasures as merely everyday items. “We had to change their mindset,” Alejandro says. “Sometimes these products are not valued. They used to get those things to feed their families, so they don’t think they can have income from that.”
The restaurant’s signature dishes reflect this philosophy of elevation through simplicity. Like their cauliflower dish, Alejandro points out. It combines pickled cauliflower stems (traditionally the tough-to-love discarded part) layered over cacao and neapia, a fermented cassava paste with chilies from the Amazon, and more cauliflower florets. It’s a richly textural plate that marries the familiar with the exotic, limiting itself to three core ingredients to let each element shine. “I mean who would think these things could go together?” Alejandro asks.
Then Pia steps up. Alejandro reverentially refers to her as “a mastermind.” In case there was still any doubt, and to silence any criticism that inevitably comes with being named the best, a couple of doors down from Nuema, they’ve opened Pia Pasteleria where the eponymous chef serves classic pastries (just to show she can do that too) infused with local fruits and cacao.
Pia Salazar’s Playful And Clever Pastries
At Nuema, she might create her dishes in a flurry of 30-minute activity, or they might take a year to develop, Alejandro explains. But the results, like Pia’s Theobromas dish, which swirls upwards from a rich mole base, and contains crunchy cacao placenta, a cacao sauce and a Mokambo granita, are playful and clever at the same time, Alejandro decides, “because Pia’s talking about something that everybody thinks that they know: chocolate. But Pia works backwards, in a way, talking about chocolate without being chocolate, but using the fruit, you know?”
As he talks, Chancha Via Circuito’s ‘Cumbion De Las Aves’ bubbles from the Nuema soundsystem. The artist molds local South American rhythms into global artistry. The entire chugging, percussive, Afro-centric playlist was put together by Alejandro and Pia’s oldest son, Martin. It reflects Nuema’s cultural synthesis, mixing progressive sounds with Latin American traditions. “If you are talking in an intelligent culinary way, it’s not worth it to frame that with elevator music,” Alejandro shrugs.
Martin is currently studying music engineering in Nashville – in fact his name, and the name of his brother and sister make up the name of the restaurant. Nuria, Emilio and Martín, became Nuema.
Nuema: Adding Its Own Distinct Notes To Latin America’s Gastronomic Symphony.
We wonder, finally, who cooks at home, when they have a rare evening off. “Depends. We both do,” Alejandro smiles. “Or we might be sick of cooking and take Nuria and Emilio to eat out,” he continues, about breaking their usual rhythm. “We like Chifa cuisine – a mix of Ecuadorian and Chinese food. A city isn’t a city in Ecuador unless it has a Chifa restaurant – dishes spread out on the table for sharing.”
And that’s Alejandro and Pia, Nuema and Ecuador in microcosm, people, and a restaurant , and a country moving to their own distinctive beat. “Latin America shines because of our differences,” he reflects, gesturing at the dining room where the service is winding down. “It’s not just Ecuador, or Brazil, or Argentina – it’s how each country’s uniqueness contributes to the whole.”
In this emerging culinary landscape, Ecuador may be what Chamorro calls “a hidden gem in Latin America,” but through Nuema, it’s finding its voice. Like the Chancha Via Circuito track filling the room, it’s a voice that honors tradition while creating something entirely new – adding its own distinct notes to Latin America’s gastronomic symphony.
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